The spirit of the interwebs

There is a whole trend (and I think my website falls right into it) of 90’s/00’s tech nostalgia. Quite a few of us feel that the implicit promises of an interconnected world were broken and we need to go back to the prophets. A quick guide for creating your own website the same way you would do it 15 years ago is this one: Web revival. I like the goals of these movements, I am not sure I am convinced with the approach the author is taking. There is no need to build a web site without modern static generators (hugo, jekyll), and markdown is such a great authoring tool. The modern tool stack is vastly superior to the one we had in the 90s.

The goals of a self-hosted, largely decentralised web are still very much alive (e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/), though I am not sure this community has yet found its messiah. At some point someone with enough will and stamina will find a way of making it trivial to self-host (or invent some kind of hybrid), but until then we might have to go through the purgatory of mediating our on-line lives through social media platforms.