A lovely reminiscence from Matt on how he came to fall in love with the World Wide Web.
I really hope he posts this on his own site—it’ll be a shame when this disappears along with everything else being posted to Medium.
This is a terrific presentation from Paul. He gives a history lesson and then focuses on what makes the indie web such a powerful idea (hint: it’s not about specific technologies).
After the last decade, where platforms have emerged as a core constituent of the web on which many rely, it may feel like things cannot change. That the giants are so big that there is no other way. Yet, to give into this feeling – that things can’t change – is not necessary. It is the way it is is not true on the web. We can make change. It’s your web.
The rise of dot-com companies was pitched as a no consequences gold rush. We were on the precipice of a fictional future where everyone would be cashing in on the web. The reality was quite a bit more slow, and boring. Business on the web consolidated, as we now know, and left most people holding the bag. There’s no knowing exactly what will happen with AI technologies, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something far more boring and centralized than what’s being promised.
I remember Jon telling me this lovely story when we first met in person. I love the idea that we had already met in a style sheet.
I also love the idea of hosting your own little internet archive—that Bill Oddie site still looks pretty great to me!
It’s a lot like an embarrassing family photo, but I’m owning it!
The return of RSS and POSSE points to a revival of the personal website ecosystem that thrived in the early blog era. Writers, researchers, technologists and more are relaunching their independent homepages, complete with feeds, as both a public notebook and a channel for sharing insights. The personal website is the ultimate sovereign territory online, enabling creators to share content on their own terms.
I feel like Joan Westenberg has come up with the perfect tag line for personal websites (emphasis mine):
By passing high-quality, human-centric content through their own lens of discernment before syndicating it to social networks, these curators create islands of sanity amidst oceans of machine-generated content of questionable provenance.
Write for yourself.
Baldur Bjarnason has written my mind.
Did you know that the World Wide Web has fifty words for document?
Monday: how the web works.
Day seventy.