Today I Learned@lemmy.worldbyThe Picard Maneuver@lemmy.world
23 hours

TIL about the "Indie Web", a revival of the days of personal websites on the early internet. (screenshots included)

English

Today I learned about the “Indie Web”, a sort of web revival of the early internet days when everyone made personal websites and linked to each other rather than using the handful of big corporate sites.

People seem to be either self-hosting their websites or using a hosting service like “neocities”. The result appears pretty authentic to the late 90s/early 00s: a wide range of polish, very niche and specific interests, page visit counters, guest books, chat rooms, random little games, etc.

It’s tempting to get into. I figure that this might be something that would appeal to a lot of people on the fediverse too, so I thought I’d share. Here are some random pics of people’s websites:

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    • Surp@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11 hours

      Can someone help me figure out how to find these sites and maybe where I can start one of my own? Is there an app I can download on my computer that helps me find this stuff or whatever

    • FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      13 hours

      this is probably going to become the normal internet again after the inevitable social media age verification laws get passed.

    • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.mlEnglish
      11 hours

      Fuck yeah!!! Everyone should make a site like this! I’ve been having tons of fun with mine recently.

      The indie, the Fediverse, the Gemini Protocol, and Protoweb (and Linux, of course) have made using the computer genuinely fun again.

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9 hours

      Ah the good old days when XSS was a feature lmao

    • StuartB@social.teamb.space
      18 hours

      @The_Picard_Maneuver I sometimes think that the next iteration of “The Indieweb” is “The Fediweb”', with all these sites hooking in to each other using ActivityPub.
      WordPress and Ghost already do this, and I’m sure there are more, we just have to reach a critical mass.

      • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldEnglish
        17 hours

        What would that look like? Maybe some sort of system where you could assign your site tags (e.g. star trek, linux, cats) and people could navigate by a relevant topic?

        • StuartB@social.teamb.space
          9 hours

          @The_Picard_Maneuver Just to give one, rather niche, example…
          I haven’t used Lemmy in a long time, but I’m assuming you can search for tags.
          Try doing a search for #egcc - this account here will pop up, but if you’re lucky, so will @mancavgeek .
          Congratulations, youve found my small, Fediversified WordPress site.
          I picked a tag that pretty much appears on every post there (it’s the 4 letter ICAO code for Manchester Airport, where I do most of my planespotting), but there are also tags that identify the subject matter (planespotting, photography, AvGeek, etc).
          Ghost does something similar, as well as Plume (RIP), WriteFreely, and others.
          This would take WebRings and guest books to a whole new level, allowing 2 way communication between sites across a decentralised W3C spec.
          It should be fairly trivial for the people running NeoCities and other cones to setup Federation on the back end, potentially bringing all those sites into Fedi at once.
          Does that sound interesting?

          • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 hours

            I’m not sure if I can search for tags. I just tried and nothing came up, but it’s also possible that the search function in the mobile app I’m using isn’t the full search.

            Very cool idea though!

          • lyrial@anarchist.nexusEnglish
            13 hours

            Yeah, I could imagine it being like a web ring that automatically populates via federation instead of having some central site for the web ring.

    • ollie the otter ~ 🦦 (they/them)@pawb.socialEnglish
      23 hours

      This has been my favourite part of the internet for the past few years since i discovered it.

      For those interested, most people make their sites on Neocities, as mentioned by OP - though I personally prefer Nekoweb. Both are great places to get started for free though, you can’t go wrong with either.

      The basic HTML and CSS you’ll need to know is quite simple and fun to learn, so even if you don’t continue maintaining your site, I think it’s a really good creative exercise.

      If you do get involved in the community, it’s a really fun way to get to know‎ people, (whether like-minded or not so like-minded) and a great creative outlet!

      My website isn’t as fancy as some of the indie sites I’ve seen,‎ but it’s been a really fun thing to come back to on occasion and use as a creative outlet.

      I’d love to see some other people here’s sites!

      • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22 hours

        Awesome! I imagine the resources to learn html and CSS are so much easier to find these days. I haven’t done anything like that since Myspace.

        Is there anywhere that people are exchanging tips and tricks for getting started? I’d rather not go to reddit (I saw that there was a subreddit when searching for these screenshots) unless I have to.

        • ollie the otter ~ 🦦 (they/them)@pawb.socialEnglish
          21 hours

          There’s some nice indie-web oriented tutorials I’ve come across on YouTube, but I started with the classic copy pasting from w3schools :P It also helps to use inspect element in your browser on the sites you like, helps get a better idea on how things work.

          I’m too young to know what things we’re like in MySpace times but I can only imagine the resources have only gotten easier to find :)

    • Björn@swg-empire.deEnglish
      23 hours

      The indie web never went away. The masses just concentrated at corporate slopsites.

    • bayaz@fedia.io
      21 hours

      Whenever I see something like this, I like to give a quick pointer to Gemini (the protocol, which has nothing to do with the AI): https://geminiprotocol.net/

      Pages don’t have the unique html look and feel of individual web pages – everything is basically just text and maybe static images. But, it does have a small, personal feel. I don’t spend a lot of time there, but it’s fun to browse on a slow day.

    • zout@fedia.io
      20 hours

      Ah, the old internet, when you’d get 25 MB of web space with your hosting account. At some point in time you could get a .tk domain for free, suddenly everyone had one. Plenty of the old pages didn’t even have css, but used HTML tables to format the site.

      • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
        20 hours

        Reminded me of the old free ml.org SLDs which were all the rage for a brief moment. RIP Monolith.