openweb.md

You sit down at your computer and turn it on. It takes a little while to boot, so while it does that you get up to make sure nobody is hogging the line. All is clear, so you sit back down at your desk and log in.

You wanna visit that game forum again, to try and see if anybody has some gameshark codes for use on your n64. It takes a little while to load.

There is an announcement pinned to the forum, about keeping the forum running, and as such a 'paid membership' of sorts, a monthly donation to cover server costs. You decide to chip in, you like the community and wouldn't wanna see it go. In the relevant category you find that a thread of gameshark codes had been updated to include some new stuff for Super Mario 64.

Now, again.

You sit down at your computer and turn it on. It does it so fast, you cannot even get up to grab a drink. But you do so anyways because you're thirsty. When you sit back down, you realize your lock-screen now has a section where Bing AI tells you about stock prices. You don't really care, and log in.

When you do, you notice a new Microsoft Teams icon at the bottom right in the tray area. You kill it, and turn it off in Autostart.

When you open your browser, there is a new crypto wallet and AI Chat Sidebar that you didn't ask for.

Your favourite forum died a few months ago, because they couldn't keep the forum running smoothly with all the AI scrapers hitting its endpoints, and not many people discovered the forum anymore due to AI overviews summarizing it all.

This time, you wanna look up how to properly care for a plant, as you were considering to spice up your home a bit with some real plants, and not the plastic ones you've been buying up until this point. You scour the results, but feel like everything is just the same 5 points rehashed with slightly different words. Worst of all, you are no step closer to knowing how to care for plants.

You decide search engines just won't cut it, so you go to post on threads about it. When you open the site, you find out you've been banned for voicing support for palestine.

This story is about the web, how it is dying, and how it needs help.

The internet, as time went on, became less and less independent, more and more corporate, as startups and individuals saw it as a way to make big bucks. As time went on, large corporations found ways to centralize the decentralized, and put control in their hands so much that eventually, you were effectively only browsing the same few websites.

Nowadays you're not rewarded for winning a competition by the local newgrounds admin, you're asked to pay up if you don't want your data be used against your will.

The point is, the web needs help to survive and thrive. Not just the corporate web of subscriptions and abuse, but the web curated by regular people like you.

Go create a website, start blogging, sign up to an independent forum, maybe create your own forum, or support those that do any of the above; Of course this is a bit of an ask, you'll have to learn quite a few things if you are intending to run something of your own, but my goal isn't to convince everyone.

I am trying to convince just some people to help their community. local or not, to eventually help the independent web thrive.

More of the internet has to be independently ran again if we want to stand any chance of regaining what we've lost. Create a space that you own, where you can display what you want, how you want. Link it up to other people using webrings and buttons, just have fun!

It doesn't matter whether or not your website has "Good SEO", or an "easy layout" or whatever. What matters is that it's yours. Of course, try to keep accessibility in mind, but don't just make a wordpress template. If you want some inspiration, browse around https://neocities.org! it's a vibrant community of people making sites, most of which are very unique in their layout and design language, making extensive use of lots of cool tricks.

Or try out some indie social media! There's lotsa stuff out there, some of which might even just replace what you'd otherwise use :P

Newgrounds for example is still around! it's a great place to be as any artist or anyone that is interested in art; There's also tons of new stuff coming around like -- if I may do some self-advertisement -- wafrn where we try to make something somewhat tumblr-like with full CSS customization and connecting to both the Fediverse and Bluesky

Also, follow some blogs!!! many of the independent ones still have RSS or Atom feeds up that you can use in basically any reader app to follow what they're doing! It's a neat little way to aggregate things and keep up :)

This piece is kind of like an earlier version of a-love-letter.md, but I still liked it and wanted to publish it.