I observe that there's been a generational divide between Gen X and older Millennial internet natives who remember the older web and are trying to revive the minimal Web 1.0, and younger...
I observe that there's been a generational divide between Gen X and older Millennial internet natives who remember the older web and are trying to revive the minimal Web 1.0, and younger Millennials and Gen Z folks who don't remember it, find it under-stimulating, and don't care. The young ones are moving, shaking, and creating really interesting, innovative content in TikTok, Instagram, Are.na, etc. It's not even the mainstream stuff. There's lots of niche stuff going on.
So to answer what would the internet of people look like now, one must define: which people? Discounting the 'Lay People' (your very Republican parents commenting on Fox News articles on Facebook, etc.), there are now different digital native tribes that don't share the same digital cultural heritage.
I think it's inevitable that older generations eventually lose touch with the youth while the world changes and they want to go back to 'the way things were'.
Speaking as someone on the younger side of that generational divide, I’m not necessarily looking to go backwards to a Web 1.0 restoration, but I do want to take advantage of the tools available to...
Speaking as someone on the younger side of that generational divide, I’m not necessarily looking to go backwards to a Web 1.0 restoration, but I do want to take advantage of the tools available to me to build the kind of web I want, and I encourage others to do so. Web 1.0 is certainly an inspiration, but I don’t consider it the end goal.
That is an excellent way of expressing how I've come to view it lately, now that I think about it. I'm also on the younger/Gen Z side, so I never knew the "old web" all that well personally, but...
Web 1.0 is certainly an inspiration, but I don’t consider it the end goal.
That is an excellent way of expressing how I've come to view it lately, now that I think about it. I'm also on the younger/Gen Z side, so I never knew the "old web" all that well personally, but nonetheless I aim to stray as far away from everything relating to ByteDance, Facebook (and to some extent Microsoft and Google) as possible, mostly for privacy-motivated reasons.
I love that there's a sort of "counter culture" being built and worked on now in the "underground" -- beginning with smaller/simpler websites, preference towards lightweight and snappy desktop/native over web apps (but sticking to web if a whole app feels like bloat to install for like two features), and lastly but definitely not least, a more decentralized approach to "social" networking as a whole, surging in popularity recently for more than just one reason.
I'm truly (still? naively so, perhaps?) hopeful we can prevent the shift to a more 1984 society in terms of data accumulation that enables knowledge of preferences (and anything about a person really), and thus behavioral prediction of basically anyone using or standing in relation to users of these firm's services, if we start undermining the biggest of Big Tech without relying entirely on institutions like the EU to act on these issues… since as we've seen with e.g. the proposed end of chat encryption, it is no perfect saint either at all times when it comes to internet/privacy topics.
That turned out way rambli-er and longer than I initially expected it to be.., apologies.
Indeed, or a high percentage of people in older generations anyway. Where TikTok vs the old school web is concerned though, I wouldn't necessarily call that a generational divide. The people I...
I think it's inevitable that older generations eventually lose touch with the youth while the world changes and they want to go back to 'the way things were'.
Indeed, or a high percentage of people in older generations anyway.
Where TikTok vs the old school web is concerned though, I wouldn't necessarily call that a generational divide.
The people I think you're talking about are less of an age group and more of a Venn diagram overlap of people that don't love the corporate internet and people with the tech knowledge to explore, or build, alternatives and appreciate what that alternative web might look like.
Or I guess you could mean people who liternally want Web 1.0 back, but I think that's a vanishingly small demographic so I'll go with option 1 :)
In terms of values, does monetized, datamined, corporate management of creative expression and the public square appeal to the values and ideals of Gen Z? I don't think it does. It might not have occured to many of them that's what's happening yet, but it's getting harder and harder to miss.
So I'd characterize it as "people's" values versus corporate values, rather than one age demographic versus another.
Gretchen McCulloch the linguist wrote Because Internet Understanding the New Rules of Language which is a book that has good analysis of this sort of thing.
Gretchen McCulloch the linguist wrote Because Internet Understanding the New Rules of Language which is a book that has good analysis of this sort of thing.
Glad you liked it! Ok, down the nu-hipster rabbit hole... Read.cv is a LinkedIn for designers and creative types. Kinopio is a funky drawing board app that's a real vibe. Here's someone's jazz...
Glad you liked it! Ok, down the nu-hipster rabbit hole...
Read.cv is a LinkedIn for designers and creative types.
big big BIG yes to Kinopio and Poolsuite. They are absolutely my vibe. Definitely going to fuck with them some. I recently found bearblog.dev and I really like its vibe as well. All these sites...
big big BIG yes to Kinopio and Poolsuite. They are absolutely my vibe. Definitely going to fuck with them some. I recently found bearblog.dev and I really like its vibe as well. All these sites remind me of what I used to love about the internet. Getting off the big social media and into smaller spaces like Tildes and Bearblog has been super refreshing.
Please share anything else you run into! Seems we share an interest in these kinda sites!
edit: adding this to my reply, i found The Tiny Awards by checking out Poolsuite, then checking out the related Vacation merch site which led me to palm.report. After getting to palm.report I found a post they made they mentioned The Tiny Awards and it's basically everything I've been looking for!
I want to propose a reading of this article that I think is missing from the comments here so far. I don’t think the author’s is trying to claim that the bulk of internet activity can, should, or...
I want to propose a reading of this article that I think is missing from the comments here so far.
I don’t think the author’s is trying to claim that the bulk of internet activity can, should, or will move to a more “Indie web” paradigm. Rather, she’s pointing it out as an alternative route for those motivated to get more human-to-human value out of their online activity.
The thing is, lower-tech social web solutions such as webrings, message boards, & personal websites have all continued to exist alongside larger sites, since the early days of the internet up until the present day. These solutions already exist and work for the people who use them, and they’re going to continue to be viable options for the right people for the forseeable future.
With that in mind, I think the author is specifically encouraging “Too Online sickos”, as she calls them, to give this paradigm a try. These people, active & engaged internet users looking to interact with other humans online, are the ones who stand to gain the most from the Indie web. They are motivated to learn the tools and use them well.
I don’t want to fully unpack this next point right now, but I believe the real conceptual shift available here is from greater numbers of lightly engaged users to smaller numbers of highly engaged users. A smaller and more densely connected social graph yields more value than a big one with fewer connections. The Indie web doesn’t need everyone to get involved, it just needs the right people to join in the right places. That’s the whole point of a less centralized web.
So essentially, a website like Tildes? It helps quite a bit, and it'd almost be perfect for me if a few other topics were a bit more active. But I wonder if that's my late-millenial/Gen-Z brain at...
With that in mind, I think the author is specifically encouraging “Too Online sickos”, as she calls them, to give this paradigm a try
So essentially, a website like Tildes? It helps quite a bit, and it'd almost be perfect for me if a few other topics were a bit more active. But I wonder if that's my late-millenial/Gen-Z brain at work, as one other comment put it.
I personally don't think so. Even in the heydays of stuff like Gamefaqs or FanFiction.Net or even SomethingAwful could be surprisingly active. Nowhere near the point of what we'd see with Twitter, but you'd get a good few dozen topics to discuss in any given sub forum a day. I feel like modern renditions of these 00's style forums simply can't attract the same activity. Or maybe they haven't gotten lucky and this is survivorship bias talking
Yeah that's true. I don't really have a proper term for what I'm describing because these are old sites that aren't necessarily considered to be web 2.0 themselves. Maybe prototypes for what would...
Yeah that's true. I don't really have a proper term for what I'm describing because these are old sites that aren't necessarily considered to be web 2.0 themselves. Maybe prototypes for what would be eventually web 2.0, bewteen the age of "everyone has their own website" and what we'd call modern social media that started was made famous/mainstream by Myspace. It has those themed circles of web 1.0 but without the ownership. It has the communication of web 2.0 without the true friend circle/community aspects.
it's a weird intermediary era. Similar to how I am a weird intermediary that could be called Millenial or Gen Z depending on the conversation.
I don’t think the point is to return to the early web. It’s just that if people want, there other ways of using the internet that are better for engaged users than mainstream social media. Whether...
I don’t think the point is to return to the early web. It’s just that if people want, there other ways of using the internet that are better for engaged users than mainstream social media. Whether they match the old paradigm is less relevant.
Yeah, I think Tildes is one good example of the many alternatives we have to mainstream social media. The important thing is there are lots of different ways the web can be, and internet...
Yeah, I think Tildes is one good example of the many alternatives we have to mainstream social media.
The important thing is there are lots of different ways the web can be, and internet communities don’t have to be big to be vibrant & healthy. A small forum or message board with an engaged user base can be great for those who use it, and it doesn't really matter whether it scales.
I don’t think a flourishing indie web looks like anything in particular from the outside. From any given user’s perspective, it’s just the various sites they know about and frequent. There’s no “at-scale version” of the indie web, it’s just people using the web actively rather than passively.
I wish I believed in the article's sentiment. We can't go back. We won't go back. Sure, it's easy to build a website but why would I have one? If it's to inflate my ego, I'll go to some social...
I wish I believed in the article's sentiment. We can't go back. We won't go back.
Sure, it's easy to build a website but why would I have one? If it's to inflate my ego, I'll go to some social media site (anonymously or not) and say something that gets attention. If it's to share my movie reviews, there's a site for that it does also cataloging and recommendations.
How do influencers build followings if there's no user pool from which to gather people? We'd be returning to the days of old where publishers and mainstream media decided for us what's worth paying attention to. And it would cost us a lot.
The entire point of putting something on the internet is so other people can see it. If you wanted to keep it to yourself you'd just not put it online in the first place
The entire point of putting something on the internet is so other people can see it. If you wanted to keep it to yourself you'd just not put it online in the first place
Even assuming that was the case (and I don't think it is), there's a difference between "wanting other people to see it" and wanting to get it published on a space for the largest possible pool of...
Even assuming that was the case (and I don't think it is), there's a difference between "wanting other people to see it" and wanting to get it published on a space for the largest possible pool of users.
In the early days of LiveJournal and Xanga type services basically nobody expected anyone to read their blogs. Comment sections were mostly between a handful of people in a blog-ring, some of which grew but most of which didn't. For the most part people were just posting to hone a craft or preserve their work on something they could share with people they knew but didn't necessarily care about broadcasting it to all and sundry.
I can, but they'd be borderline altruistic goals, and altruism implies a sense of self-actualization. Apparently Maslow's Hierarchy is discredited these days, but there are several layers I would...
I can, but they'd be borderline altruistic goals, and altruism implies a sense of self-actualization. Apparently Maslow's Hierarchy is discredited these days, but there are several layers I would need to furfill before I get to that point:
Safety: I'm more or less safe, but I still aren't quite at that financial safety net yet. I'm still paying off a house and want to get a new car next year, and my savings is still tumultuous atm.
Love/Belonging: I won't mince words here: I'm very lonely. I'd need to properly resolve this before I could truly do anything for others (in the grand scheme of things).
Esteem: It's going along but there's still many goals I want to accomplish. Goals that hopefully gain me respect, but I guess we'll see.
And I feel I'm doing better for myself than most others my age (loneliness aside). Fact is the world is very unstable right now and that gets in the way of doing furfilling work for the sake of others.
In what way? the argument is pretty simple: Maintaining something "for fun" takes time/energy, and I literally don't have the security, time, nor energy to maintain my own website unless that site...
In what way? the argument is pretty simple: Maintaining something "for fun" takes time/energy, and I literally don't have the security, time, nor energy to maintain my own website unless that site itself could help in ensuring some personal security. And I imagine that isn't an uncommon position among my generation.
You can certainly argue that I'm missing other reasons, but my argument isn't contradictory.
I see. Sociology isn't a hard science, so in this case "discredited" =/= "probably/completely untrue", as it may with say, String Theory being discredited. I should have clarified. I think the...
In other words, your argument relied upon a premise you referred to as false
I see. Sociology isn't a hard science, so in this case "discredited" =/= "probably/completely untrue", as it may with say, String Theory being discredited. I should have clarified.
I think the idea of hierarchies is a convenient mental model to lay the ideas out, but the infamous pyramid structure is extremely flawed (and never actually established by Maslow, funnily enough). The ideas on higher level human needs is still true, but it is not a neat little pyramid so much as a vague blog of concepts.
I wanted to acknowledge this flaw in the hierarchy to address the most obvious counter argument; because the pyramid is flawed, nothing is stopping me from making my own website anyway. You don't necessarily require security to reach self-actualization, but many would still prioritize the former before pursuing the latter. Some don't. In this case I somewhat prescribe to this pyramid structure and am prioritizing baser level needs first.
Hope that clears things up. I want to make some certain resources one day but I'm not at that point in life first. I'm still learning and surviving as of now.
Apologies for the off-topic digression. People like to say this, but it's not really true. It's still the best game in town if you're interested in studying quantum gravity, and as a modelling...
Apologies for the off-topic digression.
as it may with say, String Theory being discredited.
People like to say this, but it's not really true. It's still the best game in town if you're interested in studying quantum gravity, and as a modelling framework it has found use in other areas of physics as well as pure math.
I think the point is that those who want something else can go back (or forward onto something new), and indeed, they routinely do. There are still other sites on the web besides huge centralized...
I think the point is that those who want something else can go back (or forward onto something new), and indeed, they routinely do. There are still other sites on the web besides huge centralized social media, and there are people who use them (case in point, here we are on Tildes).
That’s fair, point taken. What I wanted to point at is Tildes as an example of non-mainstream social media with a more Indie web-compatible philosophy, which in my opinion still makes it a good...
That’s fair, point taken. What I wanted to point at is Tildes as an example of non-mainstream social media with a more Indie web-compatible philosophy, which in my opinion still makes it a good example of an alternative to the small set of dominant “Big Tech” sites.
Fortunately, the internet is actually still full of personal sites and blogs. If anything, there’s only getting to be more of them, if you know where to look. For just a couple examples, there’s...
Fortunately, the internet is actually still full of personal sites and blogs. If anything, there’s only getting to be more of them, if you know where to look. For just a couple examples, there’s the Tildeverse, a whole constellation of independent servers, each full of users making cool personal sites & socializing, as well as Neocities, which offers free, user-friendly hosting for personal webpages, with over 600k takers so far.
It is intentionally nonprofit and privacy focused though. We are not the product here and some of us are contributors, either in cash or content or both.
It is intentionally nonprofit and privacy focused though. We are not the product here and some of us are contributors, either in cash or content or both.
Here's the stats as they are available: https://ts.bauke.xyz/ We're just under 24,000 registered users. If I remember right, it was something like 13,000 before the reddit drama occurred in May...
This is a relatively huge centralized social media site. I can't find statistics on how many users it has, but it has increased substantially since the reddit exodus.
I agree, browser support for some of those more user-empowering tools would be great. Are you familiar with Neocities? It’s not a browser-based solution, but it gives out free web hosting and lets...
I agree, browser support for some of those more user-empowering tools would be great.
Are you familiar with Neocities? It’s not a browser-based solution, but it gives out free web hosting and lets you upload and edit HTML files right in the browser. I think it’s a great step towards a more user-empowered web, and it has a pretty sizeable userbase (over 600k users).
I don’t see why basic enough html to make a website needs to be formally taught in class. What killed the small scale social web was spammers and bots. The hassle of moderation put lots of people...
I don’t see why basic enough html to make a website needs to be formally taught in class. What killed the small scale social web was spammers and bots. The hassle of moderation put lots of people off the prospect of rolling their own site with comments sections. Twitter kind of replaced comment sections on blogs directly, and a big part of that is that Twitter let you filter out the spam.
Is this something we want out of the Web as a native feature? It's simply hard to imagine given the current decades paradigm of how things work. And most importantly, where is all that published...
To this day there is no real concept of "publishing" something on the Web. There is no "upload" button in your browser. Your browser can't edit .html files. Your browser is for retrieving and displaying content. If you want to publish something, you have to go to Youtube, Twitter, TikTok and Co.
Is this something we want out of the Web as a native feature? It's simply hard to imagine given the current decades paradigm of how things work. And most importantly, where is all that published data stored?
quite the opposite, they removed what little was there (FTP support, RSS support).
Technically yes. But this was in the 00's when extensions/plugin models were popular for all sorts of software. Web browsers weren't different. You may not have it natively but it takes seconds to find some sort of extension for these functions. Functions that are container'd out into it's own sandbox with less security ramifications (the original reason FTP was removed)
I observe that there's been a generational divide between Gen X and older Millennial internet natives who remember the older web and are trying to revive the minimal Web 1.0, and younger Millennials and Gen Z folks who don't remember it, find it under-stimulating, and don't care. The young ones are moving, shaking, and creating really interesting, innovative content in TikTok, Instagram, Are.na, etc. It's not even the mainstream stuff. There's lots of niche stuff going on.
So to answer what would the internet of people look like now, one must define: which people? Discounting the 'Lay People' (your very Republican parents commenting on Fox News articles on Facebook, etc.), there are now different digital native tribes that don't share the same digital cultural heritage.
I think it's inevitable that older generations eventually lose touch with the youth while the world changes and they want to go back to 'the way things were'.
Speaking as someone on the younger side of that generational divide, I’m not necessarily looking to go backwards to a Web 1.0 restoration, but I do want to take advantage of the tools available to me to build the kind of web I want, and I encourage others to do so. Web 1.0 is certainly an inspiration, but I don’t consider it the end goal.
That is an excellent way of expressing how I've come to view it lately, now that I think about it. I'm also on the younger/Gen Z side, so I never knew the "old web" all that well personally, but nonetheless I aim to stray as far away from everything relating to ByteDance, Facebook (and to some extent Microsoft and Google) as possible, mostly for privacy-motivated reasons.
I love that there's a sort of "counter culture" being built and worked on now in the "underground" -- beginning with smaller/simpler websites, preference towards lightweight and snappy desktop/native over web apps (but sticking to web if a whole app feels like bloat to install for like two features), and lastly but definitely not least, a more decentralized approach to "social" networking as a whole, surging in popularity recently for more than just one reason.
I'm truly (still? naively so, perhaps?) hopeful we can prevent the shift to a more 1984 society in terms of data accumulation that enables knowledge of preferences (and anything about a person really), and thus behavioral prediction of basically anyone using or standing in relation to users of these firm's services, if we start undermining the biggest of Big Tech without relying entirely on institutions like the EU to act on these issues… since as we've seen with e.g. the proposed end of chat encryption, it is no perfect saint either at all times when it comes to internet/privacy topics.
That turned out way rambli-er and longer than I initially expected it to be.., apologies.
Indeed, or a high percentage of people in older generations anyway.
Where TikTok vs the old school web is concerned though, I wouldn't necessarily call that a generational divide.
The people I think you're talking about are less of an age group and more of a Venn diagram overlap of people that don't love the corporate internet and people with the tech knowledge to explore, or build, alternatives and appreciate what that alternative web might look like.
Or I guess you could mean people who liternally want Web 1.0 back, but I think that's a vanishingly small demographic so I'll go with option 1 :)
In terms of values, does monetized, datamined, corporate management of creative expression and the public square appeal to the values and ideals of Gen Z? I don't think it does. It might not have occured to many of them that's what's happening yet, but it's getting harder and harder to miss.
So I'd characterize it as "people's" values versus corporate values, rather than one age demographic versus another.
Gretchen McCulloch the linguist wrote Because Internet Understanding the New Rules of Language which is a book that has good analysis of this sort of thing.
Thanks for introducing me to Are.na! I really like niche communities and websites. You have any other recommendations? I wanna stay hip with the youth
Glad you liked it! Ok, down the nu-hipster rabbit hole...
Read.cv is a LinkedIn for designers and creative types.
Kinopio is a funky drawing board app that's a real vibe.
Here's someone's jazz board
Here's a dream blog board
Here's someone's musings on the slow life
Poolsuite is a hip internet radio site that simulates a retro desktop and plays retro-contemporary dance music.
big big BIG yes to Kinopio and Poolsuite. They are absolutely my vibe. Definitely going to fuck with them some. I recently found bearblog.dev and I really like its vibe as well. All these sites remind me of what I used to love about the internet. Getting off the big social media and into smaller spaces like Tildes and Bearblog has been super refreshing.
Please share anything else you run into! Seems we share an interest in these kinda sites!
edit: adding this to my reply, i found The Tiny Awards by checking out Poolsuite, then checking out the related Vacation merch site which led me to palm.report. After getting to palm.report I found a post they made they mentioned The Tiny Awards and it's basically everything I've been looking for!
I want to propose a reading of this article that I think is missing from the comments here so far.
I don’t think the author’s is trying to claim that the bulk of internet activity can, should, or will move to a more “Indie web” paradigm. Rather, she’s pointing it out as an alternative route for those motivated to get more human-to-human value out of their online activity.
The thing is, lower-tech social web solutions such as webrings, message boards, & personal websites have all continued to exist alongside larger sites, since the early days of the internet up until the present day. These solutions already exist and work for the people who use them, and they’re going to continue to be viable options for the right people for the forseeable future.
With that in mind, I think the author is specifically encouraging “Too Online sickos”, as she calls them, to give this paradigm a try. These people, active & engaged internet users looking to interact with other humans online, are the ones who stand to gain the most from the Indie web. They are motivated to learn the tools and use them well.
I don’t want to fully unpack this next point right now, but I believe the real conceptual shift available here is from greater numbers of lightly engaged users to smaller numbers of highly engaged users. A smaller and more densely connected social graph yields more value than a big one with fewer connections. The Indie web doesn’t need everyone to get involved, it just needs the right people to join in the right places. That’s the whole point of a less centralized web.
So essentially, a website like Tildes? It helps quite a bit, and it'd almost be perfect for me if a few other topics were a bit more active. But I wonder if that's my late-millenial/Gen-Z brain at work, as one other comment put it.
I personally don't think so. Even in the heydays of stuff like Gamefaqs or FanFiction.Net or even SomethingAwful could be surprisingly active. Nowhere near the point of what we'd see with Twitter, but you'd get a good few dozen topics to discuss in any given sub forum a day. I feel like modern renditions of these 00's style forums simply can't attract the same activity. Or maybe they haven't gotten lucky and this is survivorship bias talking
Yeah that's true. I don't really have a proper term for what I'm describing because these are old sites that aren't necessarily considered to be web 2.0 themselves. Maybe prototypes for what would be eventually web 2.0, bewteen the age of "everyone has their own website" and what we'd call modern social media that
startedwas made famous/mainstream by Myspace. It has those themed circles of web 1.0 but without the ownership. It has the communication of web 2.0 without the true friend circle/community aspects.it's a weird intermediary era. Similar to how I am a weird intermediary that could be called Millenial or Gen Z depending on the conversation.
I don’t think the point is to return to the early web. It’s just that if people want, there other ways of using the internet that are better for engaged users than mainstream social media. Whether they match the old paradigm is less relevant.
Yeah, I think Tildes is one good example of the many alternatives we have to mainstream social media.
The important thing is there are lots of different ways the web can be, and internet communities don’t have to be big to be vibrant & healthy. A small forum or message board with an engaged user base can be great for those who use it, and it doesn't really matter whether it scales.
I don’t think a flourishing indie web looks like anything in particular from the outside. From any given user’s perspective, it’s just the various sites they know about and frequent. There’s no “at-scale version” of the indie web, it’s just people using the web actively rather than passively.
I wish I believed in the article's sentiment. We can't go back. We won't go back.
Sure, it's easy to build a website but why would I have one? If it's to inflate my ego, I'll go to some social media site (anonymously or not) and say something that gets attention. If it's to share my movie reviews, there's a site for that it does also cataloging and recommendations.
How do influencers build followings if there's no user pool from which to gather people? We'd be returning to the days of old where publishers and mainstream media decided for us what's worth paying attention to. And it would cost us a lot.
Can you imagine reasons why people might want to write or produce something for reasons other than attention or adulation?
The entire point of putting something on the internet is so other people can see it. If you wanted to keep it to yourself you'd just not put it online in the first place
Even assuming that was the case (and I don't think it is), there's a difference between "wanting other people to see it" and wanting to get it published on a space for the largest possible pool of users.
In the early days of LiveJournal and Xanga type services basically nobody expected anyone to read their blogs. Comment sections were mostly between a handful of people in a blog-ring, some of which grew but most of which didn't. For the most part people were just posting to hone a craft or preserve their work on something they could share with people they knew but didn't necessarily care about broadcasting it to all and sundry.
I can, but they'd be borderline altruistic goals, and altruism implies a sense of self-actualization. Apparently Maslow's Hierarchy is discredited these days, but there are several layers I would need to furfill before I get to that point:
And I feel I'm doing better for myself than most others my age (loneliness aside). Fact is the world is very unstable right now and that gets in the way of doing furfilling work for the sake of others.
In what way? the argument is pretty simple: Maintaining something "for fun" takes time/energy, and I literally don't have the security, time, nor energy to maintain my own website unless that site itself could help in ensuring some personal security. And I imagine that isn't an uncommon position among my generation.
You can certainly argue that I'm missing other reasons, but my argument isn't contradictory.
I see. Sociology isn't a hard science, so in this case "discredited" =/= "probably/completely untrue", as it may with say, String Theory being discredited. I should have clarified.
I think the idea of hierarchies is a convenient mental model to lay the ideas out, but the infamous pyramid structure is extremely flawed (and never actually established by Maslow, funnily enough). The ideas on higher level human needs is still true, but it is not a neat little pyramid so much as a vague blog of concepts.
I wanted to acknowledge this flaw in the hierarchy to address the most obvious counter argument; because the pyramid is flawed, nothing is stopping me from making my own website anyway. You don't necessarily require security to reach self-actualization, but many would still prioritize the former before pursuing the latter. Some don't. In this case I somewhat prescribe to this pyramid structure and am prioritizing baser level needs first.
Hope that clears things up. I want to make some certain resources one day but I'm not at that point in life first. I'm still learning and surviving as of now.
Apologies for the off-topic digression.
People like to say this, but it's not really true. It's still the best game in town if you're interested in studying quantum gravity, and as a modelling framework it has found use in other areas of physics as well as pure math.
If you have any extra time, volunteering can be a way to both meet people and do good.
I'm not opposed to the idea if the work looks interesting. I'm not exactly sure where to look, however.
I made a topic about it. Check it out if you haven't yet
I think the point is that those who want something else can go back (or forward onto something new), and indeed, they routinely do. There are still other sites on the web besides huge centralized social media, and there are people who use them (case in point, here we are on Tildes).
That’s fair, point taken. What I wanted to point at is Tildes as an example of non-mainstream social media with a more Indie web-compatible philosophy, which in my opinion still makes it a good example of an alternative to the small set of dominant “Big Tech” sites.
Fortunately, the internet is actually still full of personal sites and blogs. If anything, there’s only getting to be more of them, if you know where to look. For just a couple examples, there’s the Tildeverse, a whole constellation of independent servers, each full of users making cool personal sites & socializing, as well as Neocities, which offers free, user-friendly hosting for personal webpages, with over 600k takers so far.
It is intentionally nonprofit and privacy focused though. We are not the product here and some of us are contributors, either in cash or content or both.
Here's the stats as they are available: https://ts.bauke.xyz/
We're just under 24,000 registered users. If I remember right, it was something like 13,000 before the reddit drama occurred in May and June.
I agree, browser support for some of those more user-empowering tools would be great.
Are you familiar with Neocities? It’s not a browser-based solution, but it gives out free web hosting and lets you upload and edit HTML files right in the browser. I think it’s a great step towards a more user-empowered web, and it has a pretty sizeable userbase (over 600k users).
I don’t see why basic enough html to make a website needs to be formally taught in class. What killed the small scale social web was spammers and bots. The hassle of moderation put lots of people off the prospect of rolling their own site with comments sections. Twitter kind of replaced comment sections on blogs directly, and a big part of that is that Twitter let you filter out the spam.
Is this something we want out of the Web as a native feature? It's simply hard to imagine given the current decades paradigm of how things work. And most importantly, where is all that published data stored?
Technically yes. But this was in the 00's when extensions/plugin models were popular for all sorts of software. Web browsers weren't different. You may not have it natively but it takes seconds to find some sort of extension for these functions. Functions that are container'd out into it's own sandbox with less security ramifications (the original reason FTP was removed)