Small Web Experiences...

Sometimes algorithms can be a good thing. As a part time "musician" (and I use the term loosely), Youtube saw me seeking out all sorts of content about vaporwave recently, when it suddenly thought, "hey, let's throw a video about the indie web at this guy!" I forget who it was, but they focused largely on Neocities pages, and why we needed more personal web pages in our lives. Now I'm not going to lie about my age... I remember freaking WOODEN ABACUSES in elementary school. But I also remember Geocities and all that went with what was bascially a decentralized web experience about 25 years ago. It was good fun. Except for goggle dot com. THAT was a nightmare!!

So I've gotten back into making my own pages again... glad my copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver still works! And as I mentioned recently, I've been giving BBS's a shot and even IRC. I probably haven't been on IRC in 20+ years!! And then of course, there's gemspace, which I'm actually loving.

What, you may ask, is so appealing about it all? Well, gentle reader, my thoughts are, that this will be an individual experience for everyone. For me personally, I am enjoying the level of personalness that I'm finding. It's been more fun to chat asynchronously with a BBS sysop than to get 50+ likes on a social media post. It's been even more fun to actively seek out the content I want rather than be fed a constant stream of what a platform thinks I want. But more importantly, I feel like I've found the "Route 66" of the information superhighway. It's a little slower here, it's less crowded, and there's interesting things to see.

Sometimes, a big platform algorithm actually works out for the better!

Cheers.