Introduction to the Personal Web
I have been a long-time lurker in the 32-Bit Cafe webring hosted on Neocities —a free webpage hosting server for static pages. Part of the “old web” craze in the late 2010s, when Y2K was a growing trend among the younger generation, 32-Bit Cafe is part of a collective of webrings who sought to acquaint younger folks with the idea of building websites as a hobby, and revive the “personal web” movement of the 1990s.
What a “webring” means is nuanced on the individual communities who run them, but the modern interpretation of “webring” is a collection of websites detached from major search engines, but interlinked organically from one webpage to another through the use of “buttons” placed by their creators, in a fashion colloquially called a “neighborhood”.
These buttons usually lead to the personal websites of the owner's friends and associates, and are decorated chaotic graphcis from anime, pixel art, and niche interests their creators had. Authors link their friend's websites or webrings they support for users to follow.
To completely visit a webring, users typically have to hop from one website to another in a circular manner until they end up at their origin.
Note: There aren’t any rules websites part of the “personal web” has to follow, but through community & culture, trends and similarities began to occur.
Each site typically has a “manifesto”, a page where they detail the goals and beliefs of their website, and a “logbook, where visitors can record their name and a small message to document their travel.
A webpage can be about any topic, for the public or yourself. It exists in a digital space available to the public but also uniquely obscured so both anyone and no one could be visiting your website, which gives users the anonymity to be safely and authentically cringe, leading to the creation of many abstract and wonderful creations. Many of these websites disregard usability and best practices, opting instead for an artist experience. They often do not work on phones, and feature audio, video games, and cinematic experiences.
Punk Rock Web Folk Revival
The existence of “Webrings” is deeply rooted in the web revival counter-culture and social movement. The inspiration behind forming “webrings” was to question corporations' usage of technology in our lives to enforce systems of control and oppression.
Note: A burning candle produces one gram of CO2 in about 90 seconds.
The carbon footprint of visiting amazon.com and www.nytimes is around 3 grams per view.
On average, they still produce less carbon than 16% of all webpages.
A static site [all webpages hosted on Neocities] emits around 0.001 gram of CO2. This is how they are able to offer free website hosting.
Personal websites in Webrings don’t feature tags or keyword advertisements in their content, and as such, you cannot uncover these Webrings through a search on Google or Yahoos. Instead, you must encounter these Webrings through organically traversing various indie websites linked to each other through buttons. Only by having their direct web address can you access these websites, and in a way you have to be let in through a fated encounter with a forum post, or these days, Youtubers as the web revival movement is becoming more mainstream.
Not quite the dark web, but similarly invisible to most users of the internet, they occupy a “third space” in the digital world, bordering between the invisible and seen. Just as cogs [webpages] who doesn't fit inside the machine [search engine optimization], just as in real life, webrings represent the people and places we were taught to overlook by society. Many webrings are sanctuaries to a hidden community of LGBTQ+, anime, furries, and social recluses who are shunned and hidden by society, in which their few outlets of cringe passion are only available through these third spaces on the internet.
They provide and encourage heavily the usage of free RSS readers, a software program that allows you to collect and view updates from various websites in one place by subscribing to their “RSS feeds”. They are used to subscribe to websites and read their content straight from the internet without needing to see Adds or go through a search engine, especially when these websites aren’t advertised on SEOs.
In fact, one of the most popular manifestos on the Indie Web features a link to one of our own reading’s citations: “In Defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steyerl. [Source: melonking.net/melon?z=/home]
Humanity Behind the Movement
November 17. Bogged Sunday afternoon.
I found the 32-Bit Cafe webring by happenstance in my travels through the Indie Web. I was drawn by first sight to its button pinned on one of its member’s websites. Plus, the name had a good ring to it. Like a banked hearth away from the cold rain [hyperbole for the Internet].
They hosts seasonal, month-long projects for the community such as Pride ’23, and Code Jam #5, where community members volunteer their time (similar to a hackathon) to create a new collection of sub-pages for their website —with new decor and features— dedicated to each cause/event/holiday. These subpages range in topic from a Maget Poetry page for pride to a new “skin” for the webpage in October for Halloween.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend one of their in-person workshops on Zoom, where I was able to take a look behind the internet persona of the people who made some of the most famous sites on Neocities. Jay, owner of transrats.neocities.org, a site with 800,000 views, was one of the mentors in the discussion. I wanted to learn more about the motives, what bands people together on the internet, and why try to make this a community effort.
In a Zoom meeting room of 11 people worldwide [most of them choosing to use they/them pronous], we talked about topics ranging from building personal websites to web culture to programming in HTML [this is a technical medium of creativity].
For an hour or two, we just shared updates on and supported each other! We talked about how Reb, an artist with no programming experience, was learning JavaScript from looking at how other sites do there. Many websites encouraged aspiring programmers to rip out code from their websites and re-purpose them for their own.
I asked Jay [transrats.neocities.org] about how to start creating your own manifesto for our website, to which he responded “You don’t need a manifesto, sometimes it kind of speaks to itself. Perhaps they are even a bit cliche on our modern era. Most sites don’t have one anymore”. It seems manifestos are increasingly associated as only a relic of the past, only on the foundational websites that inspired modern webmasters. Joe [dead.garden] mentioned his problem with manifests: “A week later I want to add more stuff, and putting opinions in blog posts is more natural for me.”
We shared references to culture and websites that were meaningful to our lives and discussed the importance of books, which have the power to change someone’s life [https://maggieappleton.com/library]. We talked about how creating websites us is an art, and there can be different mediums. One user talked about his journey to change his social media intake by getting his emails and news from an old dot matrix printer in the 90s. There seems to be a deep love for old tech in the community, as you would expect from a bunch of outcasts and weirdos trying to relive the old relics of the internet. [https://aschmelyun.com/blog/getting-my-daily-news-from-a-dot-matrix-printer/]
Varve, the owner of write-on.org, loves domain names and has spent a considerable amount collecting his favorites. Loren really prefers the medium of a webpage, as it is never finished. You are always changing. Whereas an actual page is more of a stamp that underpins you to the page and time of the writer. “Perhaps this makes programming so entertaining because you get such instantaneous feedback, whereas if you were a printmaker you need to iterate your designs on different textures.”
The reasoning and possibility behind creating personal websites are amazing. Professionals have made personal websites for their co-workers [you're here because you're my colleague and want to know how we can best work together] about how they would want their social interactions to go and their working ours. It included their personality types, and how they like to add value to a team meeting/conversation. [https://manual.jvt.me/]
James, [https://jamesg.blog/] another admin and host for the workshop, is both a Zine maker and web builder, and creates physical versions (in zine form) of their online websites, for the real world. “This is how I see my site, my writings. I see my website as a body, a metaphor of a magazine” said James, as he recounted his experience tabling at a zine fair. “Sometimes it [zine] feels like a lesser version of a webpage because there is audio, and interactive elements that you use.” The discussion became really interesting, and we discussed potential solutions and alternatives. Can I just give people a flash drive at a zine fair?