[thequadehunter]

I sorta doubt it. Anybody who speaks Japanese knows it's really hard to get reliable information on topics searching the Japanese web. You find all these Matome and personal sites that are loose with their sources or unclear with their phrasing. It's interesting because you do actual web "surfing" and learn a lot more interesting things along the way, but it's not good for centralized knowledge or social interaction.

Personal sites still exist in the west, but nobody really seeks them out. I think this is because in the west the "web" and "social media" grew into becoming the same thing, while in Japan people still see them as mostly separate entities.

[GeneralMaximus]

> Personal sites still exist in the west, but nobody really seeks them out.

The IndieWeb movement, standards like WebMention, services like Neocities, and a growing Fediverse have made it so that there is at least some interest in personal websites in the Anglosphere again. I follow a lot of people in my RSS reader, and there’s a growing community of people regularly writing blog posts, having conversations via their blogs, maintaining digital gardens, and generally building small, niche, non-commercial websites for fun. Not to mention people writing email newsletters.

It only appears as if the web today is dominated by corporate interests. It’s true that most people stay within those walled gardens, but there are many people still building things outside of them. A more human web still exists, but you need to specifically go looking for it.

I recommend starting with https://ooh.directory. If your city has an IndieWebCamp or Homebrew Website Club, you might have good luck there.

[OfSanguineFire]

I have followed blogs in a few hobbies and interests since the early millennium, and all I see there are bloggers closing up shop left and right, because they claim to be drawing almost no visitors in the walled-garden age. Even when a blog still draws comments, the community who comment may have dwindled to a few obviously autistic or mentally ill people, and their style of commenting probably alienates many who stumble upon the site and might have stuck around.

It is only on HN that I see people talk about the indie web outright flourishing. But I suspect what is flourishing is a community of people who came together to identify as an indie-web community. Not people who want to write about a topic (particularly a non-nerd one), get read and commented on by other followers of that topic, but don’t particularly want to be part of a specific indie-web subculture.

[082349872349872]

For some values of "nobody"; this westerner enjoys https://search.marginalia.nu (in addition to more common engines) and has high hopes for the new site browser: https://search.marginalia.nu/site/bikobatanari.art?view=info

[marginalia_nu]

Neocities is also kinda stoking this particular flame. It's niche, but also undeniably both big and diverse.

[gwervc]

> Anybody who speaks Japanese knows it's really hard to get reliable information on topics searching the Japanese web.

Really depends on the topic. If you're searching for "water business", the results are amazing: there's pages explaining at length the difference between each subtype of businesses, shop aggregators and ranking, even people discussing the service providers, etc. I agree that that mentioning sources isn't a priority but that's the exact same thing in the West save for research papers.