---
author:
   email: [email protected]
   image: https://petermolnar.net/favicon.jpg
   name: Peter Molnar
   url: https://petermolnar.net
copies:
- http://web.archive.org/web/20211219180249/https://petermolnar.net/article/old-web-new-web-indie-web/
- https://indieweb.social/@pmlnr/107474910743342877
- https://twitter.com/petermolnar/status/1473254837584371718
lang: en
published: '2021-12-19T17:40:00+00:00'
summary: If you have to decide on the order of creative freedom vs data ownership,
   what order do you choose?
syndicate:
- https://brid.gy/publish/twitter
tags:
- indieweb
title: Old Web, New Web, Indie Web

---

When you set your mind to search for something explicit, the internet
becomes an incredible place: from the tiny, "recommended for you" world
of algorithms claiming to know you better, than yourself, you're
suddenly in uncharted territories of thoughts of others.

There were times, long ago, when this was normal. For example, there
were specific websites built only to contain links to other sites -
'portals' - or communities that connected sites to the eachother -
webrings -, so it was easy to suddenly drop of your known internet.

This is much harder today, particularly because some of those
recommendation engines (think of youtube, netflix, and so on - even ebay
(!!!) recently) are not bad at all. There's only one, tiny issue: they
tend to limit whatever they recommend more and more, only showing you a
glimpse of what is available on their service, let alone on the
internet.

Usually this phenomenon is called a "recommendation bubble", and to get
out of it, one needs to deliberately seek beyond it. This isn't trivial
though: there are known unknowns (when there's a question on an exam you
know you should have learnt, but you didn't) and unknown unknowns
(things you'd never before heard of). If we don't know what to look for,
which is the vast majority of the internet itself for anyone, the search
engines become useless. That is why links to other sites were and are so
utterly important: to be able to explore. *There is the "I'm Feeling
Lucky" button on Google, which once took a friend of mine to a Flash
version of the 'Tunak Tunak' song when he searched for "Cthulhu" eons
ago, so using that button can sometimes be fun, I'll give Google that.*

In the past weeks I've found myself staring at websites designed in
early 90s Geocities style, particularly at web manifestos: why their
site exists, and why it was better in the good ol' days, and how can it
be similar today[^1][^2][^3]. Surprisingly enough, there were similar
manifestos from before the web2.0 craze of the early 2000s[^4], but most
of them now seems to be lost to decay[^5].

Most of these manifestos are new, written in the 2020s by people who had
experienced the 90s web. They all have some overlapping thoughts, such
as: the web should stay weird, whacky, whimsical, *(why do all these
words start with a w?)*, personal websites are important, the creative
freedom one's own site gives is wonderful, and that social media is
becoming monotonous and lifeless.

There are also a lot of people longing for something they believe is
lost:

> I miss the useless web. I miss your grandpa’s blog. I miss weird web
> art projects that trolled me. I miss fan pages for things like hippos.
> I wish I didn’t feel like the web was collapsing into just a few sites
> plus a thousand resumes. [Sarah
> Drasner](https://twitter.com/sarah_edo) [Jul 1,
> 2018](https://twitter.com/sarah_edo/status/1013427276350873600)

They are only partially correct. Much of the old content is still there,
but because they are not HTTPS, or haven't been updated in years,
decades sometimes, Google de-prioritizes, or even purges them from the
search options. Google, sadly, has no obligations to remembering[^6].

**These days there are wonderously easy to use tools to make websites -
although some of them are better[^7], than others - so why isn't
everyone making their own page?**

Some early social networks, such as MySpace, allowed profile
customization at a very deep level, which is actually enough for many
people to make a small self-representation on the net. I was recently
pointed at modern, but similar examples[^8], showing how many are happy
with simply a profile they can completely design. They are not after a
whole website, they are after a way to be creative.

In 2019, Flash was killed off, and Vice published an article: "Flash Is
Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era"[^9]. There is no
overstatement in that title; the Flash era was absolutely incredible. It
didn't just give us geniously designed websites (I vividly remember the
site of Cuvée des Trolls, a beer, with a built in minigame), meme
citadels[^10], unforgettable minigames, no; it also gave us things like
Happy Tree Friends[^11]. Flash had it's problems (many of them to be
honest), but it indeed gave an unprecedented flexibility to be original,
and many used it to expand the possibilites of the web, to go beyond
text and websites.

Coming to this realisation I got into some ~~arguments~~ discussions on
the IndieWeb chats[^12] about ordering the IndieWeb principles[^13].
There are multiple elements on the list of IndieWeb priorities, but no
matter how many times I read it, the one I believe to be the most
important - "have fun" - is down at the bottom, like a bit of an
afterthought.

The IndieWeb wiki[^14] is a disturbingly messy, but staggeringly deep
site, with a crazy amount of collected reference, knowledge, and tooling
around the IndieWeb Movement. It is important to realise that the
IndieWeb - as in indieweb.org - is not the same as that manifesto from
1997[^15] called "the indie web". The former is a community, a movement,
made up of people believing and following those principles, whereas the
latter is the old Internet, The World Wide Web: a haphazardly entangled
mess of individual websites.

As time passes, not truly owning a digital creative work, including a
website, can quickly become a problem. There are many documented cases
where usernames, handles, subdomains were taken over by the host[^16],
and even more cases of hosting providers, silos, etc going under[^17].
One must have the option to move and save their content to avoid losing
it, hence the need for your own domain name, which can be repointed to
another place, if needed.

The rest of the IndieWeb ideas, in my opinion, are completely optional.
For example, marking up HTML with microformats[^18] is only useful if
someone wants their content machine-parseable for other IndieWeb sites
(or search engines that still respect microformats v1). *This is the
reason why there aren't clear guides: this is not a step-by-step thing.
The owner of a website needs to decide what functionality they want to
participate in, and for those functionalities, the guides are much
clearer.*

However... many people leaving social media might want to leave it and
it's features - likes, comments, etc - for good, and are looking for
their own place, their own home on the internet. In many cases this is a
creative, visual call. There is no need to first register a domain name
to start filling this desire: jump on a place like Neocities[^19] and
start creating - and **I firmly believe this is the most important step:
the will, and action, to create**.

**It might be time for IndieWeb to rethink principles and priorities**.
The current list might appeal to developers, or people deeply emerged in
utilizing social media silos, looking to ease their workflow, or their
fears of losing their content, but it doesn't necessarily talk to the
ones looking to satisfy the call of creativity, or those disillusioned
of social media itself.

*PS: I asked my wife, Nora, to proof-read this entry. At the beginning,
her immediate answer to the question in the summary was: "of course data
ownership has priority!". After reading it through I I asked her to
revisit the question, and she told me that if she sells a painting - she
has been practising Chinese brush painting for many years now[^20] -,
she loses that painting, yet that loss will make her happy, and so
maybe, the possibility of creativity is indeed higher on the list of
priorities.*

[^1]: <https://flamedfury.com/manifesto/>

[^2]: <https://sadgrl.online/newoldweb/manifesto_full.html>

[^3]: <https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/>

[^4]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20010805195949/http://www.uzine.net/article63.html>

[^5]: <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/>

[^6]: <https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a-librarys-job-f58db4673351>

[^7]: <https://pinegrow.com/>

[^8]: <https://twitter.com/search?q=carrd.co>

[^9]: <https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3awk7/flash-is-responsible-for-the-internets-most-creative-era>

[^10]: <https://z0r.de/>

[^11]: <https://mondomedia.com/channel/HappyTreeFriends>

[^12]: <https://indieweb.org/discuss>

[^13]: <https://indieweb.org/principles>

[^14]: <https://indieweb.org>

[^15]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20010805195949/http://www.uzine.net/article63.html>

[^16]: <https://indieweb.org/why#Avoiding_problems>

[^17]: <http://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Deathwatch>

[^18]: <http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page>

[^19]: <https://neocities.org/>

[^20]: <https://instagram.com/liulangmao_art/>

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