I thought that "A Website to Destroy All Websites" as a bit precious but like this for the "I'm feeling lucky" logic alone. The author is right. The internet was good and now, I'm sorry to say, sucks. I'm worried something's gone for good.
On the Internet: any movie I want to watch; any song I want to listen to; an endless parade of games to play via Steam et al.; about a zillion games I can play online with friends; numerous app store options, and an entire other world of smartphone games I can play alone or with friends; inexpensive LLMs I can do almost anything I want to with, wherever my imagination takes me; porn, a lot of porn; infinite social media; infinite videos on youtube; any skill I want to learn, there is - what might as well be - unlimited material on how to do it; any book I want to read; communications, email, instant messaging, tele-whatever; just about any kind of get-x-done software I could ask for, and if it doesn't exist an LLM will create it for me tonight; shopping, whatever you want to buy, you can shop for it, research it, look at it; want to start an LLC? Internet. Want to file a trademark? Internet. Want a passport? Internet. Book a flight/hotel/B&B/car rental? Internet. Plot a holiday? Internet. Have a hobby? Communities on one platform or another. And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
This is definitely inspired by the print book "house of leaves", a strange work of ergodic fiction: The subset box layouts with backward text, the coloring of a single word a bright color throughout ("house" and "Minotaur" in HoL)
I was just thinking to myself about how much the internet was lacking in self-important esoteric gibberish. I am unsurprised to see it came from the same person as "A Website to Destroy All Websites".
I am especially befuddled by all the comments stating "This is how the web used to be!"; no it wasn't, and I can only imagine those who think so collate their view of web history purely through what others say on Mastodon and Twitter (who in turn probably constructed their view of the time from the twelfth or so chinese whisper down the line of various blogs and manifestos).
I feel this is a slightly cruel comment. It’s a website of creativity, very well executed. Also, if you read the text, it is right.
Some of the presentation (such as the inverted / mirrored square) is pure art. In an admirable sense: art.
While I get the commentary — that bit reminded me of House of Leaves which has been criticized for the same thing — there’s a real human behind this, who obviously cares deeply about the issues they’re communicating about (and has the skill to do so quite incredibly.) Sometimes I wonder, in the ease of critique, what it’s like for the anonymous person on the other end, and I don’t feel good here. I feel like your comment doesn’t quite account for the humanity of someone else, nor of someone doing something with passion.
Exactly. Have you noticed that most of these 'weird web' sites don't actually talk about anything besides the web itself? Every other 'indie web' site I stumble upon is just about the indie web.... or worse, just a list of links pointing to other similar sites.
There’s no real value here. No new info, no original content. Just clunky web design and rants about 'social media bad.'
That’s not how the web actually was. Everyone used to bring something to the table, instead of just talking in circles about the table itself.
When I was a kid in the 80s there were fake 1950s diners everywhere, with jukeboxes and malt machines, bubble gum music and greasy hamburgers. They were a cheap nostalgic simulacrum of something not originally all that special. That was because there were still a lot of people alive who were teenagers in the 1950s and wanted to show their kids or grandkids something kinda-like the world they grew up in. It drifted further and further from reality along with the people who inhabited that world, who grew old and died. Now we just have faux 50s diners and a lot of old movies to look at.
Apart from the sibling comments that makes some excellent points, the commercial aspect of any endeavor will almost always coexist, or in some cases, overshadow the "artisanal" aspect that the "indieweb" people seem to be going for.
Even if we completely deleted the Internet and started from scratch, or any other technology for that matter, enterprising people will want to use the technology to deliver some sort of value to society in return for goods and services. This is both a good thing for the people in question, as they can be paid for something they love doing, addresses previously thought of use cases (such as online shopping or video streaming, in the case of the Internet) that people would be willing to pay for, and leads to commercial exchanges with many positive downstream effects (internet providers laying infrastructure, companies investing in software, and associated employment for many people).
Certainly, I owe all of my jobs and many of the friendships that I continue beyond their meatspace boundaries, precisely because the Internet and commercial services on top of it that enabled it to happen.
Without this aspect, the Internet would likely be left in a niche, which makes it far less useful to most. This is the primary reason why projects like Gemini, etc. will not have much success, because it is intentionally designed to be not useful to most people; and guess what? You can always make plain HTML/CSS websites and set up a Matrix server for your buddies to talk to; you don't need a new protocol and sing praises about the indieweb to make this happen.
Agree. It reads like something an LLM would generate in response to the prompt "Edgy dystopian gloom about the state of the modern web" if you kept replying "Edgier!" until it made everything lowercase.
For something a bit more “substantive” (or perhaps earnest) but still reminiscent of the same aesthetic this evokes, I recommend spending a few minutes poking around big gulp supreme: https://biggulpsupreme.neocities.org/
As soon as I saw the scrolling "made by henry (from online)." at the bottom I thought "marquee" tag. Sure enough when I inspected the DOM it does use one.
Curious detail: the button/widget icons of the browser chrome are composed of multi-layered box-shadows (i.e. one box-shadow definition per pixel or line, concatenated to a sting) of a `:before` pseudo element. (I don't think that I've seen anything alike before.)
This reminds me of the way the Internet was in the past. And the random sites to which this site links. (If you have not seen Neocities, it is another similar place which is the predecessor of Geocities before Yahoo! bought it and killed it.)
The book that this website is inspired by...its plot seems to echo my impression of what these “Old/small web elegies” are becoming.
A man stumbles upon the idea of a thing that itself is borne off the account of someone else that never actually came to pass. Madness ensues. And madness perhaps precedes the event. ‘Weird and eerie’.
Wow Yeah I definitely see that a lot in its larger structure. The House of Leaves stuff is kinda all on its sleeve, but the kind of serial structure of it feels so much like Invisible Cities now that you say this.
con|1 month ago
I've added quite a few Easter eggs and a few old school games. Let me know what you think?
Blue dots are locations of previous visitors.. it all works well on desktop, the games need a bit more love to work well on mobile.
con|1 month ago
romperstomper|1 month ago
holoduke|1 month ago
noduerme|1 month ago
dekken_|1 month ago
only-one1701|1 month ago
adventured|1 month ago
On the Internet: any movie I want to watch; any song I want to listen to; an endless parade of games to play via Steam et al.; about a zillion games I can play online with friends; numerous app store options, and an entire other world of smartphone games I can play alone or with friends; inexpensive LLMs I can do almost anything I want to with, wherever my imagination takes me; porn, a lot of porn; infinite social media; infinite videos on youtube; any skill I want to learn, there is - what might as well be - unlimited material on how to do it; any book I want to read; communications, email, instant messaging, tele-whatever; just about any kind of get-x-done software I could ask for, and if it doesn't exist an LLM will create it for me tonight; shopping, whatever you want to buy, you can shop for it, research it, look at it; want to start an LLC? Internet. Want to file a trademark? Internet. Want a passport? Internet. Book a flight/hotel/B&B/car rental? Internet. Plot a holiday? Internet. Have a hobby? Communities on one platform or another. And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
patcon|1 month ago
It's a great book :)
yallpendantools|1 month ago
> this site is built with Eleventy and Sass, and uses ~no JavaScript~ a very small amount of JavaScript for the House of Leaves post.
So, HoL confirmed.
omgmajk|1 month ago
GaryBluto|1 month ago
I am especially befuddled by all the comments stating "This is how the web used to be!"; no it wasn't, and I can only imagine those who think so collate their view of web history purely through what others say on Mastodon and Twitter (who in turn probably constructed their view of the time from the twelfth or so chinese whisper down the line of various blogs and manifestos).
vintagedave|1 month ago
Some of the presentation (such as the inverted / mirrored square) is pure art. In an admirable sense: art.
While I get the commentary — that bit reminded me of House of Leaves which has been criticized for the same thing — there’s a real human behind this, who obviously cares deeply about the issues they’re communicating about (and has the skill to do so quite incredibly.) Sometimes I wonder, in the ease of critique, what it’s like for the anonymous person on the other end, and I don’t feel good here. I feel like your comment doesn’t quite account for the humanity of someone else, nor of someone doing something with passion.
boca_honey|1 month ago
There’s no real value here. No new info, no original content. Just clunky web design and rants about 'social media bad.'
That’s not how the web actually was. Everyone used to bring something to the table, instead of just talking in circles about the table itself.
noduerme|1 month ago
When I was a kid in the 80s there were fake 1950s diners everywhere, with jukeboxes and malt machines, bubble gum music and greasy hamburgers. They were a cheap nostalgic simulacrum of something not originally all that special. That was because there were still a lot of people alive who were teenagers in the 1950s and wanted to show their kids or grandkids something kinda-like the world they grew up in. It drifted further and further from reality along with the people who inhabited that world, who grew old and died. Now we just have faux 50s diners and a lot of old movies to look at.
supriyo-biswas|1 month ago
Even if we completely deleted the Internet and started from scratch, or any other technology for that matter, enterprising people will want to use the technology to deliver some sort of value to society in return for goods and services. This is both a good thing for the people in question, as they can be paid for something they love doing, addresses previously thought of use cases (such as online shopping or video streaming, in the case of the Internet) that people would be willing to pay for, and leads to commercial exchanges with many positive downstream effects (internet providers laying infrastructure, companies investing in software, and associated employment for many people).
Certainly, I owe all of my jobs and many of the friendships that I continue beyond their meatspace boundaries, precisely because the Internet and commercial services on top of it that enabled it to happen.
Without this aspect, the Internet would likely be left in a niche, which makes it far less useful to most. This is the primary reason why projects like Gemini, etc. will not have much success, because it is intentionally designed to be not useful to most people; and guess what? You can always make plain HTML/CSS websites and set up a Matrix server for your buddies to talk to; you don't need a new protocol and sing praises about the indieweb to make this happen.
asukachikaru|1 month ago
https://henry.codes/
akoboldfrying|1 month ago
AndrewStephens|1 month ago
catskull|1 month ago
pekim|1 month ago
twosdai|1 month ago
masswerk|1 month ago
Meaning: also no images.
manuelmoreale|1 month ago
PlunderBunny|1 month ago
"my cathedral-seeing eyes finally came in the mail, really excited to try these puppies out. oh holy shit"
0. https://bsky.app/profile/strange.website
Freebytes|1 month ago
regenschutz|1 month ago
/s, if it wasn't obvious...
tolerance|1 month ago
A man stumbles upon the idea of a thing that itself is borne off the account of someone else that never actually came to pass. Madness ensues. And madness perhaps precedes the event. ‘Weird and eerie’.
xtiansimon|1 month ago
Gormo|1 month ago
evanjrowley|1 month ago
nice_byte|1 month ago
amiantos|1 month ago
noduerme|1 month ago
beepbooptheory|1 month ago