hey, so in this video, I'm gonna explore a part of the internet you might not have seen in a while. Call it the indie web or the small web, the esther web, whatever, and I'm gonna tell you about it, why I like it, and how I think you should get involved. This is a little bit different from my usual content, so thanks for checking it out, and special thanks to my patrons for allowing me to make a video like this. For the past few months, I've spent a lot of my time in online social spaces in NFT and crypto circles. Part of this was an accident. I follow a number of artists who committed wholeheartedly to NFTs as a way for independent artists to make money off their work, and instead of unfollowing them, I mostly just sat and watched what they were doing and occasionally asked questions. But I also do kind of have myself to blame because the other part was sort of on purpose. As you may know, a few months ago when Neopets announced their NFTs, I made a

video about it, where I voiced common criticisms that other people were making, and my own skepticism. What you may not know, mostly because I only mentioned it like once or twice on TikTok, was that I joined the Discord server mostly to keep tabs on what was going on in the community. If you're unaware, there was a lot of drama revolving around this. After I made my video, Pet Simmer Julie and YouTuber Izzy both made wonderful videos about it, which I recommend if you were feeling a little lost about this topic. But that's not really the point of this video. My point is to say that when you join one NFT Discord, you tend to get a lot of invitations to other NFT Discords. Actually, if you've watched Dan Olson's amazing NFT video Line Goes Up, then you know how common an experience this is - the spamming of users in crypto Discords with invites to others. And by the way, if you haven't watched Dan's video, then I highly recommend that you do, especially if you don't know what I'm

talking about talking about NFTs and crypto. It is a really good primer on these things and how they work, or how they don't. So, needless to say, for the past few months in a lot of my social spheres, I've been kind of deeply immersed in the NFT/cryptos so-called web 3 philosophy. And honestly, one of the reasons I stayed was because I was fascinated. I mentioned in my video about Neo-NFTs that I'm somewhat sympathetic to the stated goals of a lot of people who espouse crypto and web 3 as the future. I'm a 32-year-old person who has been dreaming of a metaverse since I was 15. The decentralization and democratization of the internet, decisions made by communities and voting, artists getting paid for their work, all of these things are wonderful on paper. And if you listen to the crypto people, that's web3, a pro-privacy, anti-corporate, democratized world where the internet widens from just being a solar system of

about 10 social media giants to an entire galaxy of planets for internet users to play in. But y'all, I gotta say, after looking at it for a while, web 3 ain't it. Here's a thing you need to know about web3: it's basically a rebranding effort. This means that if you've been paying attention to the crypto conversation for the past decade, then you actually already know what web 3 is. Though believers call it an inevitable future of the internet, what they're basically talking about is exactly what bitcoin guys were talking about 10 years ago. Don't be fooled by their language. Web 3 is not inevitable, especially when you realize that most of them can't even explain the infrastructure that they would be using to build web 3. Like honestly, look into what they're saying because the technology that they're talking about doesn't actually make all that much sense. Also, as an aside, take note of anyone telling you that change is inevitable in order to try and sell you something. The use of FOMO if you

don't buy in now. Then you're going to miss out. Is a red flag tactic often used by scammers and con artists. And it's just good practice to be aware of when it's being used against you. And that's what most web 3 folks are doing. Selling you something. The promise of web 3 is often accompanied by the release of some new token that we promise. Really pinky swear. Will tie into our super cool blockchain-enabled new internet one day. You know, eventually. As Stephen Dale says in his blog post, web 3 is [__]. It's a rhetorical trick to set up a false dichotomy between the legacy internet world of Papa Beds and Zuckerbergs, which legitimately does suck. In a fantasy world built on technologically incoherent pipe dreams and phony crypto populism. He goes on to say it's entirely rational to want to build a more decentralized technology stack and to aspire to a more egalitarian internet.

more equitable society and a better world. However, web 3 is not the golden path that leads us to that world. It's the same old crypto [ __ ] just packaged up in a sugar pill to make it easier to digest. Okay, so what does any of this have to do with the old internet? The indie web is the small internet off in the margins away from the giant social media and the same 10 apps you have installed on your smartphone. The indie web is made up of small personal web pages, all made by individuals. Instead of finding these sites on the front page of Google because who goes down more than one page anyway after all or having them pop up thanks to the almighty algorithm, most indie websites are discovered the old-fashioned way, that is user exploration. So, for example, I discovered this anti-NFT page on yesterweb.org from clicking a button a pixel art site had on their main page, a site which I in turn found from the links of an unrelated doll-centered website. The yester web then led me to a

web ring of old-school-styled sites. A web ring, being of course, a collection of similarly themed websites all linking together in a ring, with one site linking to the next and so on. Things like web rings, site affiliates, and top 100 page aggregators were key discoverability features of the internet of my youth, and the indie web uses them to great effect now, allowing for otherwise easily overlooked websites to be seen. There are a few more tools for navigating both the old web or the newer indie web. As I said, using sites like Google probably isn't going to net you a lot of results. Archive.org, which hosts the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine, and Gift Cities, is an invaluable resource if you are interested in, for example, the archival and history of the old internet. There are a number of smaller search engines that are also a fun way of finding smaller, less SEO-friendly personal websites. Searching on these things often lead me down long, windy little rabbit holes, as most sites will then link to other sites, which will then

link to other sites, and pretty soon I find myself like 12 links deep and a little unsure how I got there. And then of course, there's Neocities. So, the real love for Neocities happened for me while I was researching my dolls video last year. I found a couple of websites on the web host Neocities, which I had run into a couple of times in the years before. Neocities is, as the name suggests, something of a modern-day Geocities. In an early tweet from the creator of the site, it was intended to be a new Geocities with free web hosting and storage, and zero censorship. It's also something of a social network. There's a dashboard, comments system, and a tagging system that allows users with similar sites to be able to find each other. But to be honest, the social media aspect of the site really isn't the selling point. With half a million websites and counting, Neocities allows for the creation and free hosting of static web pages. Static web pages, if you don't know, used to be the norm if you ever made a

website on geocities, angelfire, tripod, or just type something up in notepad and hosted it on the free web space your ISP gave you, then you're familiar with the concept. It means that there's no dynamic backend. You hard code the HTML and CSS, and everything that you code is what users see when they look at your website. This is important because it means that basically anybody can make a website, yes, even you. Like, it takes a lot of time to learn, and of course, you have to want to learn it, like all things, but ultimately, in the time of static web pages, any hobbyist could pick up HTML on a weekend and have a website by the end of it, at least if this book from 1998 I picked up at a thrift store is to be believed, which it is. Neocities is sort of meant to capture that feeling. Neocities provides no layouts or templates or drag-and-drop web designers. The basic page that users start with is so simple that it actually gave me anxiety the first time that I looked at.

it so much blank space. What am I gonna fill it with? What should you fill it with? Because here's the thing, I think you should make a personal website. So there's a page on yesterweb.org filled with manifestos pages written by those building a space for themselves on the internet about their motivations for doing so. Everyone comes to this space on a different path, but a lot of them value similar things: a free and equal space where people and communities are more important than algorithms and search engine optimization, privacy, and freedom of expression, especially for marginalized groups; a creative playground where the act of building something just for you or your community is more important than how monetizable it ends up being. If any of these things spoke to you, then I highly recommend that you go out and visit the collection of manifestos, which I have linked in the description. I started my Neocities site in February. Considering how long I've had it, it's honestly pretty small, but I've had a blast making it. I started out with a

layout designed by another user. Sadness here. Uh, but I've recently begun coding my own layouts from scratch, such as this page where I keep my adoptable and virtual pets. This is a preview, by the way. This has not been published to the web yet. So, the point of this is not to tell you what you should put on your website. The idea of a personal site is to make it personal. Put whatever you want on it. I will say I find freedom in throwing out the idea of content, of branding, of making myself a packaged and sellable commodity for others to view and consider. I do that pretty much everywhere else online, here on YouTube, for example, or on TikTok, or on Twitter, where my thoughts and ideas are creations that are meant for other people to consume. So, all that to say, while I do have some things on my site that I've made for others, like these graphics and this quiz, mostly my favorite things on any given site usually aren't in the sections labeled for you but are the sections all about.

the webmaster and their particular interests. For example, some things that I've seen that I really enjoy: I really like blogs. I like sections about dreams. I'm working on one for my site right now, actually. Collections of cute pixel art or quiz results or blinkies that describe the user in question. I'm a huge fan of shrines pages for folks to geek out about something that they like. These can just be a collection of graphics or other media, but they can also go deeper, explaining the history of something or explaining why the user made the page, loved it so much. A lot of modern shrines are of older properties, which makes sense given the indie web's general obsession with nostalgia, but I also really like the shrines that feature more recent TV shows, actors, K-pop idols, whatever, because I actually think that this is something that's important. As much as the small web looks back for inspiration, ultimately what we want is to move forward, and that might be one of my favorite things about the small web. It's forward-thinking; it's often

pro-worker and collective action. It values decommodifying your online presence, at least a little, and it is so, so queer. Like, it's super gay, super trans, super good. The indie web also questions tech solutionism, which often attempts to solve human problems by removing the human element. But easily the most remarkable and powerful thing about the internet is the ability it has to connect us with one another. Prodigy was an internet service of the 1980s and 90s. In those days, the web was still rough and somewhat difficult to use, and providers like Prodigy and AOL created easy-to-use graphical-based clients. They weren't quite the true internet as hardcore web users saw it. Instead, they were considered more like walled gardens, curated specifically for the more casual computer user tastes. Prodigy users, for example, had an original content portal with news, weather, Zagat surveys, Consumer Reports, and more all at their fingertips. But in the early 90s, Prodigy had a problem. A partnership between IBM and Sears, Prodigy had expected its user base to

use many of its platform's features, including email, to do online shopping. However, it turned out that's not really what users were doing. Instead of emailing with shops and using it for commerce, users were primarily using the system to send mail to each other. Same with the message boards, which, in spite of heavy moderation and censorship, were getting much more traffic than Prodigy initially predicted. These two systems were getting so much use, in fact, that Prodigy was losing money and they needed to do something about it. In 1991, they limited the number of free emails basic users were allowed to send a month down to 30. An additional fee of 25 cents could be paid for each email exceeding that number. This was super unpopular. A later change two years later also added a fee for the use of message boards, a change which so enraged the user base that tens of thousands of people canceled their subscriptions in protest, leading Prodigy to walk back both of these new fees. I've always really liked this story because I think it highlights the difference between the way that tech

people want folks to use the internet and the way that we actually use it. There was a time when humans were deciding the way that these tools should be used, not the tech companies themselves. And that's not to say that this isn't something that people still do today. I mean, I think there's a reason that we're fascinated with stories about k-pop stands using collective action to overload an unguarded gop web form, or when a bunch of people decide to use microform content like TikTok to make an entire musical based on a Disney property. But the power that tech has, the amount of real estate that it holds online, the convenience of it existing, does make it a lot harder to push back against. Now, I think about those Prodigy users who, when they stepped away from their accounts, maybe never knew if they were going to be talking to their other Prodigy-using friends ever again. I mean, they were risking that, but they also knew that the ability to talk to these people was worth fighting for.

meant that it was worth risking. The power of the internet has always been in its ability to connect us to others. Now in the days of outrage posting in hot text, of course, being around other people might seem like more of a bug than a feature, and maybe it is. For all the good that social media has brought, the ability to quickly organize and get your message out there, to react in real time to your favorite teen drama on Sunday night with thousands of other people, to hear people speaking their experience from thousands of miles away, in spite of all that good, I also get why we're tired. Especially over the last couple of years, we are more isolated than we've ever been, and yet here we are, having to shout to be heard over the din of hundreds of people that we didn't ask to see or hear, fed to us by likes and shares and an algorithm more interested in keeping us on the website than keeping us informed or happy. You can curate your Twitter or TikTok or YouTube feed to a certain extent, but where can you go if you just

want a space that's quiet. It's no wonder the idea of having a space to ourselves appeals to so many people. These people who have run off to a little corner of the internet and decided, These are the people that I want to associate with, and only them. I decide when I see them, I decide when I interact with them. I get why that works. So, what can you do if any of this spoke to you? If this seemed like a lot of fun, I really highly recommend making a website. Over the next few weeks and months, I'm going to be filling out my site with resources that you can use to do so, even if you have zero experience with web development. I also have links on my page right now to other sites that will provide the same help. These are very helpful and will help you decide what kind of hosting platform you want to use, how to get started. These are great, I promise. As intimidating as it might look, seriously, almost anybody can make a website. And once you realize how easy it is to do, it might become a

little addicting there's a yesterworld discord that you can join. The melon king forum is also very helpful. In my experience, these are very welcoming and helpful environments, and they can answer any questions you might have. The link to yesterweb is also in the description of this video where you can find all of their cool resources, including a link to their discord. If this whole idea appeals to you, then I'm sure you're gonna get along with this group of people. If making a site sounds like a bit too much work right now, I still recommend visiting some neo city sites or searching on various smaller search engines. You don't have to have a personal website in order to interact with and visit the small or indie web. Bring a bit of exploration and discovery back to your time online. Find something new, see a site that you've never seen. If your experience is anything like mine, then you will end up completely inspired. Good luck out there. I know this video was really different from my usual stuff. It wasn't super

structured. It was a little off-the-cuff and rambly. I'm just really interested in this topic, and I just kind of wanted to talk about it for a while, but I didn't have an ultimate point other than I think this is cool, and here's kind of why. If you are also interested in this topic, please leave any questions or comments that you have because I might cover some related stuff in more detail another time. There are like a lot of niche things to look at and talk about in this space, so you know, I wouldn't mind making a couple of smaller videos in this style if you enjoyed it. Likes also really help me know what you want to see more of, so please drop a like if you enjoyed it. Thanks again to my patrons who let me make the kinds of videos that I want to make without having to worry about the approval of the almighty algorithm. A special thanks to my top 8 patrons: Amanda Johnson, Cassandra Barker, Isabella Petroni, Mary Danielson, Natalia Tchaikowski, Smith

c and verlangenlady comic. Thank you all so much. If you want to support this type of content, take a look at pledging where you get access to early videos and some occasional bonus content. Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day.

You Should Check Out the Indie Web

You Should Check Out the Indie Web