Max Böck, a web developer, writes about the IndieWeb, CSS, performance, simple websites, and the fediverse.
HN links his posts on the return of the 90s web, emergency websites, and webmentions; one commenter calls the emergency starter kit well-meaning but a lot to ask in a crisis.
>In my experience over the last decade there are fewer and fewer ways to find a community and any success as a creator of any kind without getting corralled into social media and furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app.
Haha, my first thought after reading this comment was that I could've written it myself. I miss internet forums.
Also, I'm much more creative when I own the content I make. Doomscrolling is one thing, feeling like you're wasting your life by getting sucked into the dopamine/reward loop, another.
Reaching people is hard, because social is the main channel, but I'm experimenting with:
1) helping people (everyone) to reach me directly:
https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/
So far, I've met so, so many fascinating people this way and the depth of conversations I've (or just feedback) doesn't even compare to anything I could ever do on, say, Twitter.
2) content syndication
This one's a bit harder as there's a certain amount of bureaucracy involved
(https://mxb.dev/blog/syndicating-content-to-twitter-with-netlify-functions/)
I found a perfect solution to Twitter blocking my account for whatever reason the might have:
1. go to https://www.potato.horse/shhh
2. scroll to the bottom of the page
3. roll over the Twitter button
If you're on mobile, here's the video: https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1457702588787433473?s=20
This appears to be well-meaning (which is to say it's not the usual tautological whinging tech hate for dynamic sites, it appears to come from a place of concern for delivering important information in a crisis). But it's also quite a lot to ask in a crisis. Stuff like this should set off alarms:
> I can’t tell you how best to get static—only you can figure that out.
Okay. Is this helping? I guarantee anyone responsible for uptime of critical services is pretty overwhelmed right now, and not going to be immediately receptive to calls to make huge, abrupt architectural changes without any guidance.
Edit: this is how it should be done[1] (HN thread[2])
[1]: https://mxb.dev/blog/emergency-website-kit/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22657571
Max's previous post [1] touches on the some of the ideas from the early 90s internet that we're starting to see return today.
I'm personally most excited to to watch the return and rise of niche self-run communities that were greatly supressed during the early days of social media.
[1] https://mxb.dev/blog/the-return-of-the-90s-web/
The issue I have with mastodon is that it seems to cater to tech people, but there is an entire outside world.
https://mxb.dev/blog/the-indieweb-for-everyone/
Interesting read. I made a similar point some time ago im "Return of the 90s web": https://mxb.dev/blog/the-return-of-the-90s-web/
just my own opinion: webmentions > comments.
https://mxb.dev/blog/using-webmentions-on-static-sites/