ysabetwordsmith | Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?

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Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?

Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?

The Web Revival is about reclaiming the technology in our lives and asking what we really want from the tools we use, and the digital experiences we share. The Web Revival often references the early Internet, but it's not about recreating a bygone web; the Web Revival is about reviving the spirit of openness and fresh excitement that surrounded the Web in its earliest days. The Web Revival is not one single movement, but a loose collection of ideas and groups that fall under many names.

I heartily approve of this movement. I can't code, but I can boost the signal. So if you're involved in Web Revival, feel free to share your favorite links or other resources. Because we deserve better than enshittification.

Do you want to code your own website, or support others who do? Check out the FujoGuide.

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I had seen this before but I had misplaced the link so I'm very happy to find it again through you. Thank you for that! Even without coding (or without coding yet, hah), there's a lot of interesting things to think about... And a lot of interesting little websites to explore, too. A breath of fresh air from the big corporate, homogeneous, boring internet.

I'm happy I could help. I enjoy boosting the signal for things like this.

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It's not rocket science. My brain just won't do it. I'm lucky if I can manage a few HMTL tags for things like italics, but if it's a long post, something often goes wrong.

Now add in the fact that technology I touch tends to do things that geeks say are "impossible" or it just dies.

These are field effects. If I'm out and about, and someone else's tech misfires, my automatic response is to back away about 10 feet and say, "Try it again."

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No, gifted actually, I've been breaking tests since I started taking them. Just in other areas than computers. I can hack languages I haven't actually studied. But attempting to write code fails far more often than it succeeds. Nobody can do everything.

Admittedly, it's hilarious to watch someone standing beside me try to add up numbers on a calculator and get a different result every time. They usually melt down. I just picked a career that requires little math.

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>> Programming and coding requires little math.<<

Then we've been looking at different examples, but well, mine was in junior high math decades ago.

>> What kind of career you just picked up? <<

Wordsmithing. Writing, editing, worldbuilding, xenolinguistics, etc.

The r-word is grossly ableist, wtf.

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I have a lot of neurovariant and differently abled fans on here. We aim for an environment of tolerance.

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It sounds like we are incompatible. I wish you luck finding other blogs that will be a better match for you.

There are stages of code capability. For example, how many patterns can one hold in their mind at one time? Then level up from that is how many links are there between each pattern. Then how fractal is this patterning and linking?

Anybody can code a web page, not everybody can grasp the javascript within if they want that page to be dynamic. Dev is not a single skillset. This multiverse will always eternally lock some people out, and will prevent from some people levelling up. We may be at Web 3.0 but humans are still alpha and beta pre-release. Our technology has already outstripped us.

Not wanting to learn is also a very valid position. Our lives are complex, we have our priorities and we are a species that divides labour amongst the tribe. Providing retransmission is enough, being a designer, coder, server master is a choice, or it's more of the corporate enshitification we're fighting.

"Do you want to learn?" Is a question that alienates those who know to those who aren't levelled up. 20 years of my 27 year career as an audio producer in radio included workplace trainer duties, "do you want to learn?" was a question guaranteed to fail the teacher. I was arrogant to resort to that question twice, early in the piece. Lets say, those two people held reduced trust for my training for a long time!

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Piece of cake for some, not for others.

For example, I can code passable C and C++ but anything beyond a line or two of page clickability with javascript breaks my brain. Promises in js are "witchcraft" for example. Please don't try to explain them, they hurt. 😂

If you have a good linguistic brain, coding is easy to learn in general, but drill down to more complex things and long learned linguistic patterns in one language become hard to overcome facing another.

This applies across most skilles and technologies. One spends a large chunk of their life learning, say journalism, the "rules" of audio recording can feel alien to them, even though the rules of journalism were easy for me to learn, the "tape op" and audio trainer.

One size does not fit all.

>> If you have a good linguistic brain, coding is easy to learn in general <<

Nope, not mine. I can parse animal languages easily, but computer languages route through Math not Language. Then again, my brain really isn't wired human-standard so maybe other folks can run computer code through Broca's. My overbuilt language coprocessor is sprawled all over places that other people use for things like facial recognition.

You write:

If you have a good linguistic brain, coding is easy to learn in general

Absolutely not. Language skills are about nuance, multiple ways to say the same thing, and even suggesting images to listeners by the way you phrase things. It can be about adapting to the understanding of your listeners, based on very small hints.

Coding is about being 100% precise in what you specify, thinking through as many exceptions as you can manage, and keeping it as simple as possible.

I have both talents and skillsets to a decent level, but I doubt they come from the same parts of my brain.

That's a very useful perspective, so thanks for sharing.

I have a hunch that not everyone routes code to the same part of their brain or system of information-handling. There are two reasons for this:

1) Code is very new, which means it's not directly supported by evolution with any dedicated wetware for standard humans. Therefore the brain has to pick some extant system for it, and not every brain will necessarily make the same choice.

2) Previous studies have shown that while most people process music through general audio parts of the brains, musicians often process it through the language portion. So that kind of variability is known to be possible.

>> Then how fractal is this patterning and linking? <<

Ironically, I do think in fractals.

>> Anybody can code a web page <<

Not everyone can do that, and it's okay. People are good at different things.

>>Not wanting to learn is also a very valid position. Our lives are complex, we have our priorities and we are a species that divides labour amongst the tribe. <<

Agreed. We've had division of labor for millions of years. Some people were good at gathering different types of food. I mean mushrooms have always been a specialty. And it didn't take long for a bad hunter to look at developing some other skill such as toolmaking. Me, I always check if there's enough language for my needs, and if not, that's what I start knapping first.

>> "Do you want to learn?" Is a question that alienates those who know to those who aren't levelled up. <<

O ... kay. That's a routine thing for me to ask, because I know a bazillion things. I try to avoid infodumping on people who aren't interested. I"m not very good with brakes in that area, but I try. Not everyone wants to learn all skills. Admittedly, there are a few that I push, like identifying poison ivy.

Even worse than "do you want to learn" is "you are good at these other things (often major parts of your identity), you should find this (that you are refusing to learn or have tried to learn and failed) easy". That may work as reassurance for a nervous person who's never tried whatever-it-is. I wouldn't know. But when I have tried whatever-it-is, or find it useless for other reasons (but why would I want expertise on fashion celebrities?!) it makes me very angry with whoever uses this approach.

There is some logic to "If X, then Y" because of skill trees, but I agree that when "If X, then not-Y" is bloody irritating.

Hey would you mind if I cross posted this on Tumblr? I don't have a big blog but I do love signal boosting interesting things!

And thanks for the signal boost.

Ah thanks for sharing this with more readers!

A good place to start is Neocities, their CSS stylesheet and html editor are very easy to use and you can experiment.

Hear hear!

I see they've reached the funding goal. Have subscribed for notification of release. Cool!

It's a cool concept for a storied thing. Learning to code is a good thing. Learning something else is also a good thing.

What we need as well as coding how-to guides is how to set up community infrastructure so that we don't have to make "Jeff" or "Elon" and the like richer. And even this is not really about anticapitalism, it's about retaining control of community information and infrastructure.

Dev is the lead guitarist/singer of the band, but a band needs Weird and Gilly to round out the drummer and bassist roles - the infrastructure... the hosting and networking.

Nobody seems able to crack the nut of making infrastructure into an ubiquitous, open and free architecture.

Talke our phones. My first iPhone, a 3G, had as much computing power as my G4 MacBook and that computer was 90% of my home recording studio. The phone was locked down, heavily secured, could only run servers inside apps for app purposes. All of this in protected memory to keep the hackers out. The phone I'm writing this on has more computing power than the server which hosts this website from 1999...
https://firefly.freeservers.com/ (Of course, this server hardware has long since been updated since that website was first uploaded)

But we have no infrastructure for the "information suburban streets" that is accessible and easy to use.

The devs in that space are thinking like corporates - security, central citadels, "winning out over competition... or power."

The peer-to-peer space was what the internet was originally designed for. A defence communication technology that would continue to move information from those who transmitted it, regardless of how many nodes were knocked out. It's meant to be a non-linear thing.

All our devices could have backend server tech and deep network interconnection without 5g. Mesh networking could be built into any device and the devices become the network as well as the node.

The reason this isn't how the network works isn't hacking. All the security tools we have embedded in our devices today can still apply.

The reason the network isn't peer to peer is tracking, not hacking. Corporates and blackhats alike want a network that isn't private or secure, except for them.

AND WE NEED PEOPLE LEARNING THIS STUFF! MAKING UNPHONES, MAKING A NETWORK WHERE THE DEVICES LINK US PERSON TO PERSON VIA EVERY OTHER PERSON, END TO END ENCRYPTED, INTERMEDIARIES NEED NOT APPLY!

The blackhat hackers don't want this world just as much is the infosec goons don't want it, just as much as the corporates don't want it. Bittorrent was "evil" because ith was digital freedom.

Rant over #sns :-)

Edited 2025-04-20 23:48 (UTC)

>> I see they've reached the funding goal. Have subscribed for notification of release. Cool! <<

Yeah, I backed their Kickstarter quite some time ago and have been referring to that page ever since.

>>What we need as well as coding how-to guides is how to set up community infrastructure so that we don't have to make "Jeff" or "Elon" and the like richer. And even this is not really about anticapitalism, it's about retaining control of community information and infrastructure.<<

See now, that I can do. I'm not a coder, I'm not an extrovert, but I know a lot about social engineering and how to make a space work for lots of different people. Look at my Wednesday rotation of Good News / Hard Things / Cuddle Party. I set that up ages ago when Suzette Haden Elgin mentioned the loss of facetime relationships and how online ones can't always pick up the slack. Well, they can if we choose to include each other in our lives. Hell, I once organized a virtual baby shower for a friend because our group was scattered all over, and that was awesome.

If you're interested in community building then I recommend Strong Towns. Some of those work online too, like incremental growth. See also:

The Power of 10+
What makes a successful place?

>> Nobody seems able to crack the nut of making infrastructure into an ubiquitous, open and free architecture. <<

People are getting more into indie web, so maybe that will help. After all, intentional communities have been built cooperatively with shared amenities; it can be done.

>>The reason the network isn't peer to peer is tracking, not hacking. Corporates and blackhats alike want a network that isn't private or secure, except for them.<<

That is true. It's also one reason why I avoid much of modern tech, and indeed, much of modern society.

I'm a huge fan of Right to Own and Right to Repair.

The thing to remember is that capitalism is super fragile. It's big but it's easy to break. With President Nighogg gnawing away the roots of the money tree, it's on very shaky ground right now. So always be watching for opportunities to give it a little ... push.

>> ...capitalism is super fragile. It's big but it's easy to break.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. (Hopefully not taking too many innocents with them in the debris storm.)

"When the elephants fight, the grass suffers."
-- African proverb

Resources to be aware of for people who don't code but want to make web pages - there are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) html generator programmes out there. For people who can format a word document with headings, those are very useable. I don't know what the current best option is, because it is 20ish years since I was using them, but the one i remember was called Dreamweaver. Also, markdown is a simplified method for generating text, and there are markdown to html converters. I actually use markdown for my pages, but I'm doing that in R/RStudio, which is an environment I'm very comfortable working in, so the markdown aspect doesn't add much load.

Anyone reading this who thinks that R and markdown sound like the option for them but don't know how to get started, drop me a message and we can look at whether I can help.

I'm perfectly good at organizing a website if it has drag-and-drop buildware. It's the coding that I can't do. Weebly used to be great.

Ah. I was misunderstanding your statement about not being able to code but boosting the signal, after it was filtered through reading some of the above comments.

But also, I always want to make sure that people don't get scared off by the having to code bit; that can come after if they want, but there is a joy in making a web page. And I don't see these kinds of resources mentioned often enough that I have a bit of a soap box reaction.

Thank you! I go back to the very early web -- see Interesting.Places.to/Browse in the Web -- but have kind of lost touch with my roots in the last several years; I ought to get back to it.

I am also very fond (and a backer) of the FujoGuide, and try to encourage the use of static site generators for those who don't want to code directly in HTML -- most of them use Markdown, which is also a popular option here on Dreamwidth -- and the Git version control system (FujoGuide has a very good introduction).

I still have a mostly unmaintained web site from the days when links-to-site would get it into search engines, rather than links-to-money.

It's written in a pre-css dialect of html, with the result that it's unusually disability-friendly. I don't try to control the viewer's experience, just the meaning conveyed.

But I definitely don't fit into any of the web revival boxes listed. I merely stayed with technology that worked for me, while the world moved on to crappier and crappier(*) substitutes, just as I did with Dreamwidth.

--
(*) as measured by my experience and preferences. Doubtless some peiople like the new stuff. But IMNSHO, they are welcome to it; I don't want any.

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Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?

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