Hello Internet, Hello Web, Hello Friends. Did you know that the word “hello” was popularized as a greeting by Thomas Edison for telephone usage, even though the inventor of the telephone, Alexader Graham Bell, preferred “ahoy”? Anyway…

The Dread

I have been feeling down about the state of the web for a while. I grew up with the web. I remember the wonderful chaos in the dot-com bubble era. And at first, the so called “Web 2.0” seemed like an improvement. And in a lot of ways it was. But then the great enshittification happened. Now, we are experiencing the great sloppification. And the Dead Internet Theory seems more and more real.

The Hope

During the last year or so, I’ve been finding a lot of joy in rediscovering the weird web. I think it started when I began going through the catalogue of ShopTalk Show episodes and following the guests they had on. I discovered that RSS and personal websites are still alive and kicking. That coincided with me trying to onboard to Bluesky and Mastodon, where I have found a lot of thoughtful and original people to follow. Both on the decentralized social media sites as well as via RSS. And most of them preach a similar gospel - just build websites. This beautiful essay by Henry Desroches hit me especially hard. And even though it’ll take a little while for me to design a website as beautiful and weird as his, I figured having a website to chuck words at is a decent start.

The Effort

So this is my little corner of the web. I built it with Astro. More details are available in the colophon. I realize that it’s not feasible for everyone to custom build a website. But there are tools out there that make it pretty simple. And if not a website - maybe try joining the fediverse, whether that’s on ActivityPub (Mastodon) or atproto (Bluesky) and nudging others into it as well.

The Future

For my site, I don’t really have any specific plans. I’ll write about what I feel like. Mostly that’ll be tech, music and general musings. And despite the grim state of things politically, economically and technologically, I am trying to stay optimistic about the future. And I think there are a lot of reasons to be, you just might have to search for them a little.

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