Mastodon Feed: Post

Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤"):

kern@hol.ogra.ph ("Transient Kerse") wrote:

The appeal of the early web / #SmallWeb isn't just about mostly-technical considerations like data privacy or JavaScript being cumbersome or whatever.

It was the whole community aspect of it! People signed guest books, joined webrings, and traded banner ads for each others' sites. People made new pages whenever a significant event happened. And everyone with a website felt like both a master and an apprentice at the same time; the only real barrier to entry was minimal #HTML knowledge. It was a brand new way of expressing oneself at the time
Now the internet is largely a commercial zone run by big businesses. It's great that folks can get started with WordPress or SquareSpace or whatever but the trade-off for this convenience is the loss of the early web's eclectic personality. Today's internet is sleek and professional, but boring, and its diversity is waning as the masses favor homogenous prefabricated crap

But yeah it's also the technical stuff too