Comment by marginalia_nu
1 year ago
Yeah, I think it's noteworthy that the times in history we view as high water marks in terms of personal websites are also the times in history we had really good aggregators/navigation tools for personal websites. I think in absolute terms we aren't significantly worse off than in the '90s when "surfing the web" was so big there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.
My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.
You're (maybe) inadvertently on to something there,
> there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
I think what some of us are nostalgic for is when the "Web" was a way to pass the time. For many it was a cultural curiosity first, then an entertainment source. At some point it pivoted to being work. It turned into filing taxes, shopping for insurance, and a place for maintaining a "professional profile". From what I see of social media a great many people make it into "work" of a kind. In this metamorphosis we somehow made the silly web serious and the serious web silly. Now nobody knows the difference and so the headspace of "passtime" has itself sort of vanished.