A head of a cartoon cat that strongly resembles a certain mouse

Coming home: an odyssey through the modern internet

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun

In the past fifteen years or so, I have become lonelier and lonelier on the Internet. And maybe worst of all: utterly bored. What used to be a bustling and exciting digital world has now become a barren and lonely wasteland. My once-favorite online communities and discussion forums have dwindled to nothingness. The last days of the Wild West are long gone.

Desperate to recapture that sense of connection and community, I reluctantly turned to the big silos. Facebook Groups for example, which replaced many forums. Yet I found either groups that were dead, or groups that were so actively overspammed that I might as well be screaming into the void if I tried to participate.

So you end up checking the same few websites over and over again. Hoping for some scraps of new content. Ephemeral bursts of excitement. Mainstream search engines seem to retrieve less and less useful information, making it even harder to escape the big silos.

The modern Internet isn't fun anymore. There's nothing left to explore, and familiar places have become decidedly unfamiliar.

Wait, how did this happen?

The answer one commonly sees is that the web got taken over by corporations. There's some truth to that, but more nuance is also warranted.

In the past, there were corporate spaces that brought joy and spawned thriving communities. Social games, virtual pet games, and even websites associated with specific brands were all places worth visiting.

Often these served as advertisements, and their decline and disappearance caused many of us grief. The closure of the Virtual Magic Kingdom comes to mind. There was no malicious plan behind these closures. Instead, they were the result of detached decisions made by businesspeople who had never considered how important these spaces were to us.

Furthermore, there is a constant drive for novelty that can lead to older content falling through the cracks with each big update or overhaul.

The big silos that we so despise have gained prominence partly because they are in a way more accessible than creating traditional websites.

That search engines seem to ignore our input is tied to the way many people use them, and a general preference for quantity over quality, and thus fuzzy over exact search.

There are good explanations for all the qualms of the modern internet. But of course, it's still an unfortunate situation to be in.

What can I do?

Embrace the grassroots web revival, the retro web, or whatever you want to call it. If the modern web is professional, be unprofessional. If the modern web is minimalist, be maximalist.

Ah, but what you can do specifically? Here are some of my suggestions:

But don't take anything I said as gospel. Do whatever you want and whatever you feel like.

An epilogue

As a kid I started writing websites on Freewebs. Here I am, full circle, with my own homepage hosted on Neocities. I suppose I've come home.

Specific communities may rise and fall, but we will prevail as long as we hold true to the core principle of the living web: having fun.