Much as I make use of them, I kinda resent the persistent presence of social media in our lives. To wit, a musing I posted to Facebook a couple of years ago…
Social media isn’t entirely fun, at least not to me. It’s very homogeneous, heavily moderated, and has a bad signal to noise ratio. It’s ruled by the almighty algorithm. And as these sites are often free, it’s awash in lots of advertising. (To be fair I get it, we gotta pay the bills — but come on!)
It makes me long for the days when I floated around the web reading (and writing) blog posts, sharing fun stuff I’d stumble upon, and so on. In fact, it was about 24 years ago when I started the first iteration of my blog, fredotoday. (The earliest snapshot on the Internet Archive dates from February 2002.)
While it’s true that the socials let you do that today to some extent, the experience is less than great. Enter the Small Web, a concept/movement that recently caught my attention thanks to a YouTube rabbit hole I fell into. This video in particular from You’ve Got Kat does a pretty good job of explaining the concept and the appeal.
And y’know? It appeals to me. Bring back the webrings and blogrolls. The personal web never died, it was just on life support — given the state of things, I’m willing to bet the heartbeat is only getting stronger.