The small, real, original web
spacetimetech.wordpress.com
spacetimetech.wordpress.com
You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.
You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.
You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.
You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.
Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?
There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.
I did it the right way. I set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM. I shopped around for a dedicated box with a v4 address that had a clean reputation. I ensured the provider's ASN was also clean. I used a well known TLD. I sent absolutely zero spam. No newsletters no nothing, just regular correspondence.
But I don't send enough emails to keep my IP reputation warm, I think, because deliverability into the big providers like Microslop and Google was very hit and miss. The end result is I would never know if someone just didn't want to reply, or if my message has been silently dropped. It stopped being fun and started becoming a chore and a headache.
Nowadays I pay fastmail to worry about that bullshit. I have more important things to do with my time.
Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)
Political correctness eventually tainted the internet as then if someone's values were hurt, drama would roll around only fuelling the troll further. This later led to gatekeeping and entitlement; Tumblr as example.
The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.
I lived in rural MI and neither of my parents had a 4 year degree. I wasn't the kid of someone at MIT or in the Valley. We weren't an impoverished family, but we were somewhere between middle and lower-middle class. We were by far some of the lowest people on the web totem pole, socio-economically speaking, but access wasn't out of the question for people who didn't come from a lot of financial/educational privilege.
First of all, there wasn't much in the way of technical hurdles when it came to myspace or geocities, so I don't buy your premise at all. I was LARPing as a video game reviewer at 10 years old in 1995 with my awful <blink> tags/tiled backgrounds/table layouts. I was a dumb kid and still managed to figure it out. So did approximately one squillion of other people.
Secondly, the same tired, obnoxious comment about privilege and technology can be trotted out and applied to the early web, early facebook, early usenet, early IRC, early LLMs, early crypto. What does this comment do to advance the discussion in any meaningful way?
Even if some curious minds got past the stigma, they still had to have an actual reason to go online which for many people just didn't exist until e-commerce and social networks became a thing. And then they had to learn how to use computers. This still wasn't gatekeeping because literally anyone could put in a minimal effort and go online, but effort is the key word here.
It became truly effortless with smartphones and touch screens, but this also reduced interaction to likes and tweets, and users became content consumers to be exploited with ads. This is where we are today.
Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy
Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.
I wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject, however, I’m glad when information is made public, as it allows everyone to weigh whether it should influence their decisions.
Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.
The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.
I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.
Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..
The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.
Pro-marriage as in "prohibit marriage", I presume, since that is the cause to which he donated.[0]
https://www.pcmag.com/news/new-mozilla-ceo-addresses-anti-ga...
I should also think that libertarians should be in support of private people deciding not to support companies or people that support causes they disagree with. That's an excellent example of people's freedom of action.
I don't think that's really the problem. I think it's just because Reddit and Facebook are too large to work, period - sort of what Kirkpatrick Sale was trying to get at in his book "Human Scale". Global systems of humans connected and interacting are probably doomed to this regardless of what mechanisms are instituted, unless those mechanisms limit in some way the local size of the interaction.
I agree with you that sheer scale is the primary issue, but for a particular reason: these systems are all prime targets for malicious actors intent on manipulating people on a large scale.
As a liberal, not a libertarian, I would say that's a bit reductive.
People should have the right to express their political beliefs. The fear of cancellation and potentially losing their job etc isn't conducive to freedom of thought. Yes you individually may not agree and may choose not to support them, but here we have people actively calling on others not to support them, and condemning those who would choose to carry on engaging.
It's very divisive, 'you are either with us or against us'. That is far from any kind of liberty.
Punishing others, because they don't enforce your values is anathema to me.
Basically what is being suggested is that if I believe in democracy and freedom, I should be ok with an elected police state. It should be obvious that I can be pro democracy, but anti bad things that come out of that process.
I don't think it would be hypocritical for someone to support freedom or some other value, by removing freedom, or contradicting that value. I support freedom of speech, that doesn't extend to allowing others to lie, especially in the name of removing others freedoms. That doesn't invalidate my views or values.
This is a new thing though. I'm on my 40s, you didn't used to expect people to cancel things because you disagreed with the creators politics.
>Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
Should the sitting president get a free pass? For better or worse these platforms do need to have rules. If those rules are to be fair, everyone should be held to the same standard.
I personally don't think a single founder making that contribution is a strong enough tie to Mullvad to expect it to influence their behavior. I also don't think there's any reason to think that that party's goal will necessarily entail the curbing of digital security products like VPNs.
If anything, I think that Mullvad taking a "it's his business; it's not our role to tell individuals what they can think or do" stance is exactly what I would like a VPN to do. Others disagree.
tl;dr: It still has a great reputation outside of the Blueksy crowd.
Like many others, I miss it dearly. But I also don't think keeping it on life support is the solution. The old web is gone, it's sad, but it was a different time and you can't bring back the past.
I say this even though I have an affinity and a modest collection of old hardware and software. I literally see some of this tech every day in my home. Nostalgia is fun, but still, you can't live in the past.
The only way to get something similar to the old web back, is very unpractical. Reduce bandwidth so videos are no longer the main content form; nullify profit from polarizing content; give people an easier interface for typing or participating in forums (touch is still awful for text), etc. In other words: it won't happen. The old online experience is a fun memory, but there's no going back.
Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.
Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?
Same reasoning to why we shouldn't be using Kagi because the founder uses Yandex, a Russian state search engine for a data source.
Yolo I guess.