Notes About the Internet

Including small web, web history, social media, etc. Some crossover with fandom notes. Newer notes are at the top!

(About LiveJournal being sold to a Russian company)

It was a small piece of what was to come. Like Gamergate and the Puppies, an experiment to practice taking apart a minor but culturally influential community and develop techniques to do it again, more efficiently, more quickly, with less attention. To lay out a reliable pathway to commit harm and lie about it for so long and in so many ways that by the time the truth is available, it doesn’t matter, because the harm is a foundational part of the system we’re living in. The harm is the new status quo.

(About moving from site to site because the owners deliberately run it into the ground)

I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just fucking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love.

These were our spaces, little people who just wanted to connect. And one by one, they get turned into battlefields where we have to fight just as hard to exist as we do in the real world. And every time a few more people you never thought the Absorbaloff of hatred and gleeful sadism would slurp up don’t come along to the next safe place, and start trying to take it away before anyone can get there.

How dare they? How dare they take everyday life and load it into a cannon just to fire it back in our faces?

(About building community)

Because that’s what we have to do. Be each other’s pen pals. Talk. Share. Welcome. Care. And just keep moving. Stay nimble. Maybe we have to roll the internet back a little and go back to blogs and decentralized groups and techy fiddling and real-life conventions and idealists with servers in their closets. Back to Diaryland and Minnesota and grandiose usernames and thoughts that take ever so much more than 280 characters to express. That’s okay. We can do that. We know how. We’re actually really good at it. Love things and love each other. We’re good at that, too. Protect the vulnerable. Make little things. Wear electric blue eyeshadow. Take a picture of your breakfast. Overthink Twin Peaks. Get angry. Do revolutions. Find out what Buffy character you are. Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.

It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.

Source: Welcome to Garbage Town (Cat Valente's Substack) (2022) (archive) / Noted: 2025 April 19 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth

Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it.

When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY, you begin in a world of infinite possibility. You can tailor your content exactly how you like it, and organize it in any way you please. Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, you’ve gotta do it by hand either way. Whether it’s reverse chronological entries or a tidy table of contents. You might as well do what you want.

But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.

Source: How the Blog Broke the Web (archive) / Noted: 2025 March 10 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth

Personal websites matter - now, more than ever - because we can see, clearly, with our own eyes, what happens when a handful of companies control and own the medium and the message. It gets silenced, suppressed, and subtly reshaped without us. We get caught up in echo chambers, divided from each other, and force-fed content at the lowest common denominator. And at the end of it all - we get Trump. We get Musk. We get Zuckerberg. We get a pipeline of content slop, pitched as free, costing us everything.

I want a world where finding content is harder. Where it takes a little more work, and where we appreciate what we read, watch, and consume because it didn't come easily.

[..] We can't keep pretending everything is okay. We can't keep pretending the world we have, without personal websites and autonomy and without having a Goddamn say, is an acceptable place for the Internet to end up.

Because it's not.

Source: JoanWesterberg.com (archive) / Noted: 2025 March 3 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth

See also: Indie Web & Personal Sites link collection

So here we are: the tech and AI magnates are universally either falling in behind fascism or actively driving it. They're also desperately pushing us to use a technology that doesn't work as intended, that cripples our ability to think critically or work effectively and that can lie to us in ways they mostly control whenever they feel like doing it. Moreover, they insist on us believing all the lies that they tell us and dismissing the evidence of our own senses. They insist on being able to control our perception of them as brilliant, strong, genius leaders, and they insist on us being unable (either through incapacity or unwillingness) to think for ourselves. This is quite directly Orwellian, and it makes the fact that the industry hasn't caught on and isn't meaningfully responding to this all the more shocking. The corporate world is still talking about AI in exactly the same way they were previously: rampant boosterism or milquetoast and inadequate critique that it “doesn't always work”.

At this point, refusing to use AI, and especially LLM tools is an act of resistance. Give them no quarter. Purge them whenever you find them. Turn off Copilot. Poison any data that you put out into the world, and make it as difficult as possible for AI bots to train from your data. Treat the people who mindlessly boost AI as collaborators.

Source: DeadSimpleTech.com (Iris Meredith) (archive) / Noted: 2025 March 2 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth

While “log off” and “touch grass” are perfectly acceptable reactions to the current digital landscape, the fact remains that there's presumably some reason you were using social media in the first place. Maybe it was for sharing art, or reading news, or getting notified about events - in any case, if you still want to do those things without engaging with the Web 2.0 hellscape, the indie web is the way to do it.

Over the last few years, you've probably heard defeatist truisms thrown around like “there's only five websites now” or “the Internet is dead.” I'm here to tell you that those “truisms” are false, and the proof of their falseness lies in the indie web.

Source: Unplatform^archived / Noted: 2025 February 19 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth

I really like this idea and have posted several things about expanding your use of the web beyond the big 5 websites over the years (including Finding the Old Internet way back in 2019).

A sort of related series of thoughts:

1. Social media incentives its creators to stay on the apps by giving them inflated ad revenue money (and/or venture capital fund money)
2. Social media discourages linking to outside the system by penalizing posts with exterior links
3. Even small creators can make a decent amount of money on some apps so they're more likely to use those apps and to NOT use other apps, or even bother hosting their own website
4. Users of the apps mostly don't follow them off-app anyway because they too are disincentivized to leave (external links open in-app and not even on the phone's browser)
5. Creators don't want to bother making a personal website because nobody will go there (compared to views on their SM pages)
6. This hurts the interweb ecosystem because it keeps all the creators AND USERS on the big platforms

I do think there's room for people who make money on the internet to disconnect from SM but it's predicated on them having their own space, people being able to FIND that space, and then monetizing it in a way that makes up for the loss from the SM income. Which is very difficult because of many reasons, not least because people can't navigate through things even like basic search results (partly from user error, partly from antagonistic corporate practices that push up ads and sponsored results) to find what they want.

But anyway! Start a website! Put your stuff on it! Give people a way to contact you and then link out to other websites.