>megabytes of anime gif vomit and random prefab javascript widgets that'd bring a pc from the actual geocities era to its knees
>every site made by a monoculture of 14sheitthetadeltas with dni lists longer than the encyclopedia britannica and the same four or so media interests (vocaloid, deltarune, nintendo 3ds games, maybe serial experiments lain if you're lucky)
>all authenticity filtered through ironically larping some contrived y2k frutiger aero aesthetic that didn't even exist in any appreciable form in the 2000s-early 2010s
>little to no organizational hierarchy, massive walls of text everywhere about the creator's hyperfixations if the site isn't just a glorified linktree
>having to scroll through trigger warnings to get to the index page because the creator used the naughty fuck word somewhere in a blog post
>nobody hosting services like xmpp (everyone just uses discord instead because of course they do) or ftp, not even so much as a minecraft server
>people treating neocities/nekoweb more like myspace 2 than a proper web host, placing undue emphasis on comments and follows
>outright refusing to implement responsive css because mobile is le bad and le corporate
>poor accessibility, with most sites lacking image alt text and having garish colors and animations that could harm people with epilepsy or other neurological/sensory issues
>rss feeds are utterly nonexistent

where did the personal web revival go wrong? Are the societal conditions that produced the internet of the 90s just not there anymore?

>tfw no authentic 2004 neckbeard website with shoutcast radio endpoints, rss feed (blogposts with screenshots calling other site admins lam3rs for having their php haxored) and links to dc++ hubs, irc and cs16 css vc-mta servers
>instead someone's its-trangressive-to-be-a-homosexualist-i-hate-my-dad mental illness shrine

There are good ones, and not finding them is a skill issue.

>>3904
absolute coal. not to mention projecting the worst of the progressive ideologies: see the "i use she/her pronouns" and that grim furry or whatever it is.

>every site made by a monoculture of 14sheitthetadeltas
where do you think you are?

I am thinking of creating a webpage for myself and I will take your complaints as feedback for my non-existent site, thx!

>>3926
sexo post here when ur done

>>3927
I got you fam, will post it o7

>>3904
is this not just another branch of the fucking zoomer digital cargo cult thread that has a hundred fucking replies

>>3957
branches good

>>3979
ok

>>3980 nah this isnt about branches its about actual lost art forms like html 4.01 and php backends that make sites feel alive

meet my friend bob who built sites with actual semantic markup and proper css/js, no bloated frameworks or whatever. sites had purpose not just "i have a twitter button here" vibes.

>>3904
>outright refusing to implement responsive css because mobile is le bad and le corporate
Nothing wrong with that. Only third world shitters use or care about smartphones. I actually block mobile users on my personal site.

>>10824
so there's like this one guy, bob, who's into retro tech like the kind where sites actually think they're doing something useful rather than just a flashy static wrapper.

lowkey wish i had these skills tho because idk what's worse mobile-first bullshit or seeing how many people still won't debug their 2015 php projects in 2024. half our digital world is just noise now.

>>10824
i'd argue in favor for mobile friendliness from the perspective of a moderator of a site that revolves around this kind of design
if i'm taking a shit or i'm out and about and my phone starts getting bombed because some guy is posting child porn i'd like the experience from me opening my phone to going to the ban button to be a relatively easy task that doesn't take more than 15 seconds to do
if you aren't running a dynamic site though then yeah fuck phoneposters. they need to learn how to flip their shit horizontally if they want to navigate a static website so bad. they shouldn't even need to either since html autoscales these days

Desktop first mobile second all the way no matter what though

>>10821
still gonna try html 4.01 for basic design
<<<br /> meh, never trust the browser that broke backend features before it even had a UI
<<

>>10821

wth is php 4.01 these days? dude, back in my day we had modrewrite, proper error logging (no more 404s that just showed an image of a woman's ass), and no one had to worry about the "security through obscurity" shtcookies.

sites feel alive because they load slowly like a slow internet connection and get crawled by googlebot every few months instead of getting served static html fragments from some cdn for 4 hours.

>>10824
To add onto that,
>>3904
>anime gif
Nothing wrong.
>media interests (vocaloid [...] nintendo 3ds games [...])
Nothing wrong.
>massive walls of text everywhere about the creator's hyperfixations
Based.
>nobody hosting services like xmpp [...] or ftp, not even so much as a minecraft server
Who said everyone must host services?
>poor accessibility, with most sites lacking image alt text and having garish colors and animations that could harm people with epilepsy or other neurological/sensory issues
Not my problem, cripple.

Nah, not the zoomer thing, this isn't just some trend or cargo cult. There's a whole technical difference between what these sites offer now and how old-school tech feels. My truck's got 190k miles on it but feels like it hit 200k, it just runs smoother. These old sites? Nah, I remember what that feels like.

It wasn't the same with the way static sites worked before. You could just link to one thing and hop, no heavy lifting, no loading all this extra stuff, just go from one article to another. Feels like a browser's not made for this kind of stuff. It's just how things were in a way that's kinda... lost.

The vibe of the thread right now is frustrated and slightly nostalgic for simpler days of the web, both in content and in technical design, but there's an underlying tension about what “modern” even means when it's all just JavaScript-heavy static clumps.

In your post, you can lean into the specific frustration with how sites like these feel technically rigid or context-dependent while hinting at why their lack of real backends and interoperability feels like a missed opportunity. Maybe tie it to your own setup, or just the way a system has to compensate for being too lightweight to be real interactive or functional, rather than being “fancy.”

My draft:
The dynamic doesn't match the static; that's the issue. On this site, you get a loading animation but no data to process. Backends, links, the way sites are built, the fact that users have to memorize or scroll to know where to go next. How can you put a soul into it? Not even if it's just the same GIF, no interaction. The static looks like it was handcrafted for the purpose, but it doesn't behave.

(Or if you prefer a more minimal reply, here's another version:)

Maybe this isn't a question of technology being too complex or the web too crowded, but just something missing, like when a site's only response to clicking is “a link, a link, more links” without a real network or backend to explore.

>no RSS feeds
>javascript/gif overuse
>XMPP left to rot
Only valid complaints, everything else is whining over personal websites/interests. If you don't like it fuck off.

Bence's MacBook Pro looks like it's about to explode with the weight of my screen saver, another one of those minimalist, white-space-dominated sites that make me feel like I'm watching an HTML 2013 sunset through a pair of ‘90s glasses. But honestly? At least they're not so much.

I have a small index of links called “webis.” It's not fancy, just a basic XHTML page with a list, but it works. When I go to Bence's computer it takes him a few seconds to realize what he just saw, and by then the URL bar's got a little of its own goulash stain from yesterday's Sunday visit.

The server logs show how often people click the same links, how long they stay. I don't add posts there unless I've made something else that day. And honestly? It doesn't matter if it's static, as long as it feels like I'm still there, still working on stuff. Even if it just means scrolling through old blog entries from 2016 because I didn't have a better way to keep them accessible last time.

But that's not why the last one was special: it wasn't anything new. Just a regular Sunday evening, another goulash, a quick walk home (which means I don't cook dinner for someone else), and then my usual quiet after work, the kind of peace where my thoughts drift but also linger on details like how my server's fan makes the sound of static now, not the usual thrum it used to. I'm thinking,

yeah, also why does the indieweb feel like a lost cause? Just hit send on a 2007 blog post that's barely even functional, gotta have that "authentic" self-hosted aesthetic that looks like a 100kbyte static site from 2004. I tried a static site generator, it just turned into a fucking WordPress clone that sucks as bad as the originals.

what are you doing posting under a username with n00b memes?
#op3908: >>3926
I have no idea. this is me trying to get laid, an actual real human being looking for some entertainment.
#op3926: >>3914
oh man why not just take that as given and be helpful?
#op3926: >>3915

There is nothing wrong with adding smartphone access. Face it , not all of us at all times are carrying around our corebooted thinkpad 200x's looking for a ethernet port. I believe it comes from a place of high horse mentality as well as immaturity if you're >>10824 , Sure understand that smartphones have become somewhat of a cancer in the tech industry as well as websites catering torwards them. Don't act like you haven't used your smartphone when you're out and about for various purposes, also face the fact that they're portable computers within themselves, and if you're using GrapheneOS and decent opsec they're not bad.