chapotraphouse

Hexbear is the last fun place on the internet

I dunno what we are in now but the old web was better. 1.0 sucked. 2.0 was good though. You had all these nich communities bubbling with energy and ideas. Now it is just reddit and psyops and comodification.

https://neocities.org/browse

Hexbears should help expand our creativity on the web, by taking inspiration from NeoCities (successor to GeoCities). Not everything has to be sterile and bland and boring. I'd even like to be able to customize our profile pages more than just things like the banner and profile picture. I mean, just look at how much life can be breathed into a site with so much flexibility. Look at all the colors and non-standard layouts. What the web as lost is personality, which we should be taking back. We're on FOSS sites here in the Fediverse. We can do better, and we shouldn't be too afraid to take risks by deviating from what's accepted as "normal" these days.

We had way better tools for self-expression on older formats like early YouTube, MySpace, etc etc. We don't have to stay the course of sterile, standardized, corporatized web formats.

The original point of using the web was making things beautiful and tinkering around with different designs. It was to tell a story with the layout. That was part of the content itself, not just what we say and do online.

Edit: https://yesterweb.org/ (on NeoCities) has plenty of good and interesting information on this general topic of a worse present web (a manifesto, if you will)