* Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed5246a1b1f53d51a1feaeb1315266f769ac218436f12fda830/. And the posts are stored locally.)

* https://special.fish/ This completely low-tech social network has taken off. The innovation here is that it's all just focused on profile pages - not feeds of random posts.

* There's a growing subculture of public Tiddlywikis (philosopher.life, sphygm.us, etc) - rather than focusing on protocols and APIs, they are much more focused on how to organize and style personal hypertext.

* As for RSS, well, as HN custom insists, I am also commenting to plug my own fraidyc.at. See, you knew it was here.

* On a related note, I've also been working on an RSS/Atom extension to handle ephemeral posts: live streams, "stories", pinned posts, etc. https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Exten...

* There's also a forum on tiny personal link directories that's been forming at https://forum.indieseek.xyz. The idea here is to use Yahoo! or DMOZ style link directories at a smaller scale, to catalog corners of the Web. (Note that this whole comment itself is a kind of small 'directory'. Rather than an algorithm stepping in to show you 'related' stuff, I have.)

It never fails to amaze me how much amazing stuff is out there online, hidden by a thick layer of top search results, and even more than that, the sheer amount of individual and collective effort that has been put into each of these sites. Someone mentioned the word "niche" and there is certainly some weirdly (or wonderfully) specific content you will find in the Wiby.me index. Lots of sites that haven't been updated since 1998, but still have an enormous and encyclopedic list of everything related to some topic (like the characteristics of different types of tomatoes, or how to build a motorcycle from spare parts or whatever). Some of it may be a little out of date, but a lot of it has been submitted for indexing precisely because of its timelessness or continued usefulness.

Whenever I feel hopeless about the current state of the web, I find this is the perfect antidote!

If you're unfamiliar with the concept, a webring was a simple circular linked list. You had a link on your knitting-themed site to the "next knitting-themed site", that site had a link to the next one, etc.

To join the ring, you just emailed someone and said "hey, I, too, have a knitting-themed site, can you add me to your webring?", they looked at your site, and changed their link to your site, you added the link they previously had, and the ring continued.

I want to build something simple that'll serve a small widget with previous/next/random site buttons, it'll work like the webrings of old regarding the curation aspect, so to get added you'll need to be referred to by someone.

Would you use something like that? You'd basically just drop a bit of HTML on your page and it wouldn't load heavy JS/analytics/crap, just whatever was necessary to paint a few links.

If I continue with this thought exercise, a lot of the big indoor shopping malls around me have been knocked down and replaced with standalone outdoor stores (walled gardens?).

I'm not sure where things are going next.

It's a search engine that removes the top million domains from your search results (or top 100,000 or 10,000, etc). I find it useful sometimes to discover things on more obscure sites.

I created a subreddit recently to help with the discovery problem and posted it on HN earlier this week.

Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287286

Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/

It’s been going well so far, only a small solution to a big problem, but it’s been fun to discover a lot of interesting blogs from people in this community.

If you missed the initial post feel free to join and add yours too.

There are 2 major factors that will power a resurgence, that could use better tools:

1. Discoverability - self-reinforcing webrings, blogrolls, directories, ad free-search etc.

2. Creation - next-gen Dreamweaver. A low-code site creator app that exports a static website as a folder of readable CSS/HTML that people can tinker with by hand (and learn), instead of being locked into one of these cloud WYSIWYG site generators. Hosting is solved. No need to tie the one to the other...

Some of the "old school" web style clashes with my aesthetic sensibilities these days -- a lot of words to say I find it somewhat ugly! -- but I miss its hobbyist, non-commercial aspect. A lot of hobby style content I find interesting has moved to YouTube or Facebook these days, and everyone who's been reading HN is aware of the lack of control authors have over those platforms...

I found myself nodding in agreement to a lot of what the author was saying.

I don't miss the "geocities look" though!

There has always been a place for commerce and marketing on the web."

Not really true as I remember it. The web opened up to the public in 1993. There was no commerce and marketing in the beginning. Even by 1996 while commerce and marketing may have existed, e.g., Amazon founded in 1995, its place was in the background. As I rememember the early web, the foreground, the "starting point" or "portal", was something like Yahoo! You had to pick a topic (direction) that you wanted to go in. For example, if you were after music, you might end up browsing the Internet Underground Music Archive. The "front page" of the portal was predominantly non-commercial, mostly generic headings for topics. If you wanted to search out something commercial, no doubt you could but the initial starting point was intellectual curiosity. This is IMO what has been lost over time with regard to web use: intellectual curiosity and the ability to actually satisfy it. (A fun tangent here is the collections of inane queries that people type into Google. These are simultaneously hilarious and disturbing.)

As an experiment have a look at the Yahoo! page today. It is full of low quality mainstream "news". There is zero attention to intellectual curiosity. Nothing to see here, folks, but here is the latest news. For part 2 of the experiment, run a Google search for the term "music". The results are dominated by YouTube. Every result is directly or indirectly commercial (either selling something or conducting surveillance and serving ads), except one: Wikipedia. The chances of someone new to the web not following a link to YouTube or some other Google-controlled domain would seem almost nil.

The "onboarding" process for new web users is very different today than it was in the early 1990's. Perhaps it is still possible to approach the web with a sense of awe and wonder, pondering "What is out there?" However a new web user is scant likely to end up on a non-commercial website besides Wikipedia. What is out there? Surveillance, ads and an endless supply of soon-to-be-obsolete Javascript du jour.

i almost want to give myself nothing but wikipedia, api docs, and “small web” and pubnix. i'm not sure that i can give up hn or its ilk (but the ratio of interesting content to poor content is terrible)

Opera Mini is one awesome browser for such connections. Average page sizes were around __20 KiB__ (They use some compression proxy). No Javascript was loaded. (Simple JS tasks were delegated to server side. I guess with some optimizations they could save on those full page reloads, but maybe it was computationally expensive for those phones).

There was a vibrant ecosystem for those phones. Till this day, those websites that host pirated music from Indian movies work with simplest of WWW browsers.

That's nostalgia. I remember a Modded version of opera mini which had tonnes of other features that worked on those phones with 4-8 MiB of memory (I don't know exact specs though, they were not mentioned for those phones).

Even today, with my paranoid no-js no-web-fonts browsing (UBlock origin), there are parts of web that are efficient. Hacker news or i.reddit.com, for example.

No bullshit, just focused on the text and reading.

Hoping that more authors take this route when releasing stuff for the web.

[1] https://www.theickabog.com/home/

https://feldot.com

> tilde.club is not a social network it is one tiny totally standard unix computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to build awesome web pages

And the story behind it: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...

I'm too burnt out on web "best practices" to care about that for my personal sites anymore.

If you're curious: https://benovermyer.com

> It isn’t a particularly sophisticated way to show emotions or manifest an attitude, but still so much more interesting and expressive than what is available now:

> First of all, because it is an expression of a dislike, when today there is only an opportunity to like.

> Second, the statement lays outside of any scale or dualism: the dislike is not the opposite of a like.

> Third: it is not a button or function, it works only in combination with another graphic or word. Such a graphic needed to be made or found and collected, then placed in the right context on the page—all done manually.

> I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution.

This is anecdotal, and I'm not making a "then vs. now" argument - but there was something about the exchange that I found reminicent of this 'old web', and totally devoid from the way people communicate nowadays. I can't put my finger on it - but on what social platform where would this exchange live now?

I've recently been tasked with building a website for a small organic food distributor in Oregon. I don't think the traditional image heavy "commercial web" fits well with their company culture and image but am struggling to find examples of "small web" commercial websites to show them as examples of a different way.

It would be nice to see another post discussing how we might bring the small web to the commercial one.

1) The shift from spammy shit content as something to squash to something to allow and even promote over better content, provided it follows certain (Google's) rules. This shift (in terms of Google's behavior) happened ~2008-2010 and we haven't seen a period of spammy crap content getting heavily downranked since then, like we used to when they were still trying to stay ahead of it rather than give it a "legitimate" avenue as a method of control. Google's still being the most important search provider to appease has left the rest unable to direct behavior toward anything better than what does well on Google, so their results aren't much better.

2) A move away from actual or de facto open systems & protocols to deliberately carved up communities. The only thing keeping chat, Twitter-like services, and other social media—hell, even Youtube, so far as some kind of format for hosting video with metadata—from being standards or protocols is that business incentives reward "owning" a userbase (so you can better spy on them, and to keep anyone from providing a better, perhaps less-spying-laden client and "stealing" ad-viewing eyeballs)

Both of these are fundamentally problems of the spyvertising economy taking over the Web and I think a lot of the issues would go away if we could (legally—I don't think tech will do it) permanently and completely break that. More specifically a big part of the problem is Google, though of course the rest of the Web giants are gleefully following similar bad incentives.

However, I feel like it's moved more in the direction of being like broadcast television: lots of content that's designed to be consumed once and then forgotten. Maybe the television analogy oversimplifies the matter. Still, I think the more that content creators view their content as going into a permanent library, the better the quality.

A lot of web traffic today transits through applications and platforms. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; although I'd hate to see even more walled gardens. My hope is only that the small and independent web not go forgotten/ignored.

https://twitter.com/earthboundkid/status/1095385048008798208

I have non-tech-savvy family who has started content web sites over 20 years ago, by writing some basic HTML, and uses FTP to upload HTML files. It's a mental model that's easily understood by someone who can operate Windows. He went on to maintain the site for the next 20 years and it worked fine.

In the last couple of years I did a big migration for his site and moved it to a markdown based CMS (PicoCMS in PHP) and he's been happy with it -- having a web editor (and learning markdown, which was easy) and not have to FTP.

The thing is, it took work to set all that up (on my end, that he doesn't see). I got a Digital Ocean server, installed a bunch of stuff around PHP, wrote some custom plugins for the CMS, etc.

After having done that 3-4 years ago, I realized the more modern, ideal, alternative is to have a Git repo of markdown files, and a Netlify setup (or another similar service to Netlify) where check-ins are automatically deployed.

The problem then is this -- Git workflows are way, way too difficult for non-tech folks to understand. We're not even talking about command line or desktop git clients; even asking someone to use Github (or Gitlab) to edit markdown files to update their site is not an easy mental model to wrap around (if you're not a coder).

I think the most ideal setup, this "better Wordpress" you mention, would be to have a web UI to edit markdown files, backed by a git repo, hooked up with a Netlify-like service. I thought about working on that as a project; but it would be one that relies on using Github and Netlify as key pieces and I'm not even sure Netlify allows a 3rd party to develop apps that end up creating Netlify sites on behalf of other customers, which means I'd have to build out the full Netlify deploy flow and I'm really not in the business of doing that.

An opportunity, perhaps...