I wasn't going to post this yet, but fuck it: I miss that era too, and I wanted to make it easier for people to publish their websites, so I made this with a friend:

https://hearth.eternum.io/

It gives you a folder, like Dropbox. Drop some files in, and you have your own website (over IPFS). It's still early, but it should work well enough. I'd love to hear some feedback, if anyone tries it.

It looks great, but there is one question out of the box for me...

What about updating the site?

With IPFS this means a completely new hash unless you're running under (through?) IPNS, to point a domain at a new hash. If it's a new hash every time, you give up quickly because you don't want to propagate a new hash to any potential users every time (in the general case).

Maybe they can track the hashes and give us subdomains that redirect to the latest update?

By the way, I've added that feature now:

https://www.eternum.io/api/docs/#!/api/site_update

Hearth will ask for your Eternum API key and will automatically update your URL to point to your latest hash. Like so:

https://www.eternum.io/user/stavros/

That's exactly what we're planning on doing, we're going to add something like "username.eternum.io" or similar.

Why not full domain names?

ah that's very nice. I started building a "blogchain", which is a decentralized blogging platform, to learn how to use ethereum. probably won't release anything as I learnt what I wanted, but it's nice to see some other projects like that. congrats :)

Make it really retro - instead of a blogchain you'll need to make it a webring!

I'd be interested to see the code for it, I've been thinking about making a decentralized blogging platform that uses a unique chain for each user and would love to see someone else's take on it.

Upvote just for the term Blogchain.

Any sample sites that are based on/use hearth? Is it like a normal http(s) protocol/type URL?

Yes, you can access it both over https (through the Eternum gateway) and through IPFS. Here's my personal site:

https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmRCWYEYU2WvLJBbj54k5p1AFHZ2TefW...

Everyone is telling us they only platform we ever need, and at same time they all closed platform with their own API and without open protocols like RSS(dead for every big company).

There are only 214 million active sites and this number stop growing[1] In contrast there are 2 billion active FB user pages, and 65 million FB business pages and growing.[2]

[1] https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/969544747374260224/ph...

[2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/facebook-page-statis...

What's the relevance of your comment to mine?

When talking about this, people often like to joke about the webdesign back then. But the personal websites had personality. Facebook profiles feel like government forms to me... "here, fill in this standardized array of fields with your personal data."

I think MySpace ultimately represented the final form of the essentially unlimited customization of the early web. The terribleness of MySpace pages was, I believe, the catalyst that pushed the design trend in the opposite direction, resulting in the "standardized array of fields" as popularized by Facebook.

That said, given the cyclical nature of design trends, I strongly suspect that we'll eventually start to see a gradual shift back toward customization, hopefully avoiding the ridiculous excesses of the MySpace era.

Tumblr themes still work like this. Tumblr is actually an almost-perfect natural experiment on the value of customization, because there are two views of any given blog post: a public-indexed static HTML view, that the post's author can theme with whatever HTML+CSS+JS they desire; and an RSS-reader-like "dashboard" view, with no theming at all.

Polling Tumblr users on how they prefer to read pages—whether in the dashboard web-app, or by opening the links to the standalone HTML versions—would be pretty solid data on whether customization makes content overall better or worse from consumers' perspective.

I think a lot more sites should follow Tumblr's lead here, but I fear Tumblr is going to be shut down within the next few years and it'll be the last platform to adopt this approach (at least for a long time).

Why do you think tumblr is on the way out?

Possibly because it's owned by Yahoo and Yahoo seems to be going down the toilet? At least that's how I interpreted the parent.

I know I dont open tumblr links on mobile since they take so long to load.

Tumblr has never really lost its wide variety of customization. I'd argue it carried on the Geocities and MySpace individual touch. If you go from one personal tumblr to the next, they often vary to a great degree in atmosphere, color scheme, content posted, purpose, layout, etc. You also still see all the expected bizarre design choices, broken layouts, etc. that one would expect given that. Being able to customize it to a large enough degree to give a sense of one's personality, was one of tumblr's primary appeals to its large younger userbase.

Though it might also be worth mentioning that Tumblr is a total pain in the * to use precisely because of that customization. Every dang page is different and I never know what to click. Worse, Tumblr is so slow that every wrong click is an expensive loss of time and patience. On the rare occasion that I find a Tumblr worth following, I just use the RSS feed because the site is too frustrating.

I actually think Reddit nailed the balance for subreddits[1], even if it is a little more forum-ey than the social sites you mentioned.

I understand that might change soon, which is a shame.

[1] excepting /r/spackd--ks[2], as it always should be.

[2] post.get_opposite("R.I.P.")

I assume the upcoming changes you're talking about are the new "structured styles", which I think are overall a good idea. Ultimately, though, the key remaining question will be if they can balance the need for customization with some level of uniformity. So far they've been very slow with the beta test and appear to be taking feedback into account, which leaves me hopeful that the final result will be a net improvement.

I think that overall it's a good move for Reddit, as the prevalence of pleasant-looking neutral themes like Naut is a good indication that the default is not really good enough anymore. My hope is that the new structured styles will provide a good balance between customizability and clean design that other sites might follow as a lead.

My main complaint with reddit is that there's no real guidance on how to not get a controversial sub banned. It seems like the rule of thumb is don't get discovered by a social justice movement or a major publisher. Not that anything I would call valuable has been lost so far, but it's still a bad precedent.

Most controversial subs which have been banned have been so because the moderators tolerated users' discussions of explicit plans to commit violent crimes; /r/incel is a good example, or because the subreddit organized harassment campaigns, such as with /r/fatpeoplehate. Other subreddits like /r/shitredditsays and /r/the_donald complied with admins' orders to keep their garbage in the dumpster and have been allowed to thrive. Then of course there is the "do not sexualize minors" rule, which I think is quite clear. It's not perfect but there are subreddits which openly advocate eg fascism or communism so the rules do work in some sense. /r/againsthatesubreddits is unintentionally a good catalogue of the ways that the policies allow for more-or-less free expression while safeguarding the site from lawsuits. I find it all grotesquely impressive.

The big 2 that I heard about are the fappening and deepfakes.

Anyone with legal/pr experience care to give us some insight what you think reddits decision to ban those subs was based on (like were they actually illegal or just banned for bringing bad PR)?

I believe the fappening essentially amounted to copyright infringement, since Lawrence owned the rights to the pictures. Deepfakes is a little more questionable, because it's a very strange topic. However, faking a nude photo of someone could essentially be considered equivalent to claiming "this person took a nude photo which looks like this", which, being false, injurious, and appearing in written media, amounts roughly to libel, I believe. But I am not a lawyer so those are poorly-educated guesses.

Well they are not a bastion of free speech... They are a company. Create your own website if you want free speech (as far as you consider it ).

I could have been clearer, I'm aware they're a private company and under no particular obligation to the preservation of free speech principles. My point was that if we're comparing hosting your own site to operating on someone else's platform, it seems like there's marginally more freedom when hosting your own website.

Agreed. There were people who were using templates for their Myspace pages that were hideous. Facebook felt much more uniform and focused on the content (posts) rather than frivolous glitz. But today, I'm off Facebook and any other large centralized social platforms. In the suture if I decide to publish articles or blog posts then I'm going back to the personal web page.

I agree. The end of next neutrality may help here as the big players will get worse and worse as the telcos start taking them.

I need to write a love letter to Flash and how it made every website look like a christmas tree. There was so much life in there, it was a race to dynamism when we didn’t know how to make things dynamic. Now it’s all about flat design and static pages and don’t make the users learn a new UI and use the same CSS framework everybody else is using.

I don't miss Flash but the jaw-dropping impression when visiting Gabo for the first time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c

Wow, I remember that! I was amazed by it at the time. It was absolutely top notch.

But seeing it now has kind of ruined my memory of it, heh. Like replaying a video game from when I was a kid. But it's interesting to see just how much the standard for design has changed in a relatively short time.

That is sweet! And then there was hell.com and associated sites. But I find no video :( Basically, once you paid $100 to repurchase your soul, you got lifetime access, and a hell.com email address :)

On an unrelated note, that makes me think, why facebook won't make a paid subscription version? I would dearly pay 10-20 bucks per year or whatever they are getting from me and never see ads or get my data shared with advertisers.

Then the people who didn't pay would feel as second-class citizens who can be scrutinized, analyzed, and their profiles sold. That awareness would be deadly for Facebook, because not enough people would be willing to pay.

Advertisers only really care about showing ads to people with enough money to buy their products. An ad-free subscription lets these people remove themselves from the consumer pool, drastically reducing the value of their advertising product. Why take the chance of disrupting a system that's working for them?

Remember me of the Eye4U website as well :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aT4wt0fmGU

Haha that site was what drove me to flash/actionscript. There was another site too that made 3d popular and I got rabbitholed exporting stuff from 3d studio max into flash. Complete waste of time - clients only wanted boring splash screens and you had to talk them out of it.

DVD menus are annoying enough when you're trying to watch a film, and they're supposed to be entertaining. Can you imagine if every website was like that?

It was almost like shortly after stuff like Gabocorp. It became a fad. Websites were adding flash intros like crazy for a while. Music too.

And it was as awful as you imagine.

I am so glad that died. There was a time when you couldn't open most businesses' websites on Linux because flash support was shaky and everyone relied on all of it.

That was some cutting edge stuff

The first 3 times you saw it ;)

Dynamic stuff was in vogue when it was difficult to do. Same with rounded corners. Once stuff gets easy it goes out of fashion.

Hah, flat design and static except for the ads.

Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" has some nice thought about this point, claiming that the web in the 90s was a way more creative and personal space than today.

When I wrote Route50.net with a friend, we tried to keep that somewhat alive - to either good or terrible consequences.

Route50.net has:

* Moveable widgets * Easy theme styling * Optional complete CSS customization

And then, since one of the main points was an artistic gallery - we allowed users to share their CSS in the gallery, and other users could preview it and install it

Ex: http://route50.net/base/navarr http://route50.net/base/navarr?style=12675

I still have that feeling about Facebook. It looks and acts like the central web registry authority.

Most who were just tinkering still posted to something like geocities, but I agree that spirit has been lost. What do they do in middle school / high school web development classes these days anyway? Kind of the appeal 20 years ago was that you could learn HTML pretty easily and whip up a simple personal website like this and have fun doing it. It didn't exactly "teach" much, at least in my experience, but it was inspirational in a lot of ways.

When I took a class like that we used Dreamweaver (after writing some pages in notepad of course) and later Flash. Never learned Javascript back then, in fact our teacher encouraged us to check it out, but it wasn't part of the curriculum. It was mostly a class for anyone interested in dipping their toe in the web without any prior experience.

This is something I've struggled with. When I think of introducing people to web development I think about how I got my start - creating a website to display pictures of my newborn daughter in 1997. Only, who would do such a thing these days? People would just post those to Facebook or Instagram. Creating a web app is too much too soon in my opinion. What is a good project that has relevance in 2018, but doesn't require anything more than vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS?

> Only, who would do such a thing these days?

I would. The corporate sites you mention are cumbersome and detrimental.

Yes, creating a web app is too much, and so is a project, in my opinion. A web document is all that might be needed:

  <html><head><title>website</title></head>
  <body><img src="newborn.png"></body></html>

Isn't that overkill as well? Not sure on the current state of ftp support but I think firefox still allows ftp browsing. We had protocols and programs dedicated to sharing stuff like this before we put them behind commercial walls.

A marketing landing page is a good example.

A lot of web development curriculum these days tends to focus on writing apps with JavaScript, or learning a new library. HTML/CSS is still taught, but I feel the “HTML is not a real language” sort of drives people away.

A big difficulty is that HTML by itself doesn't give you good ways to define templates so it's a pretty dreadful task.

Web components can change that in the future but until that it's pretty normal for developers to opt for tools that allow for creating a HTML fragment and building up HTML in another language.

Imagine if we had to do the c calling convention song and dance on every function call...

There are plenty of simple templating options still out there. Twig, handlebars, and jekyll would all be good introductions in my opinion

geocities simply made it "free" to publish on the web I thought? As opposed to being a platform that enforced complex policies

Sure, but you still had to host their advertisements. I would consider it a platform, but I also wouldn't compare it to facebook.

Are you sure that they were average people? In my experience, average people only started to publish things on Web after blog platforms enabled them to do so. The only people who published in the web at that time were people with technical background (or people who had enough free time and will to learn). HTML is not easy for someone, who's not computer-savvy and a quest to publish and support your website might frighten experienced software developers even know.

Not true. Plenty of non-technical people had a web page up like this one. Nearly all ISPs included some webspace, and enough instructions to get going. Lots of people put up something on user.demon.co.uk or geocities about themselves, their hobbies or their pets etc.

Having a web presence died off somewhat as people moved over to myspace and Livejournal then geocities and tripod started being abandoned. Then it started the rise of social, and guest books and web rings slowly became obsolete.

Yep. I miss the magic of FTPing into your ISP and having that little folder where you could drop simple HTML files.

You can still drop html files on GitHub!

If you're feeling extra fancy, you can switch to gitlab to write and publish static websites in any framework of your choice (including plain html of course but you can use any framework of your choice such as Jekyll or even Vue Nuxt) right from the browser thanks to the power of the gitlab-ci.yml file. As someone who very much dislikes installing node js on my computer, I think this is fantastic.

Anecdotally I know at least three people who gained literacy with computers through their efforts to publish personal web pages so it must be at least somewhat accessible. Incidentally it is not any harder to publish a personal web site with basic HTML than it was 15 years ago, there are just other ways to "publish" online now that are easier.

Agreed. I've lost count of how many people I've met that owe their web programming careers to the Pokemon webpage they built as a kid.

I recall kids who weren't computer geniuses would still start websites about their hobbies / interests using geocities or tripod. They have wysiwyg editors that were easy.

But of course, just having access to computers and the internet wasn't a given for many families

Yup, Dreamweaver and Frontpage were very much a thing in that era. Plenty of WYSIWYG options existed.

Didn't MS Word even have a "export as HTML" option? I feel like I might have used that initially to build the first version of my CounterStrike clan's website.

They did.

IIRC this site was made in Word: https://web.archive.org/web/20060414015434/http://easternsho... (on mobile, can't look at source to verify)

Hmm, and it renders better on mobile than some modern actual "mobile" websites

it allows to zoom to perfectly readable size, no half screen taken by "use the app" with tiny close button, no social share floaters overlapping part of the text, no functionality removed for mobile, ...

Yep, good old `<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 9">`

I knew a lot of people in school and work places that were using Netscape's built-in WYSIWYG editor, Composer. They couldn't build a site in raw HTML to save their life otherwise, but they could throw something basic together in Composer. Before that, if I'm not mistaken, Navigator 3 had some kind of simple page editor with it as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

Yep. I built a page using a WYSIWYG editor sometime around 1995-1996, when I was in grade school. I knew the concept of nested HTML tags, but couldn't have written a page by hand (and I didn't have anyone to guide me).

A couple of years later, I re"designed" it. Both of them were about as cheesy as you'd expect a preteen's Star Trek fan page to be.

You forgot hotdog professional. Hated how frontpage mangled the code!!

That's brought back some memories for me! This is the only screenshot I could find from a brief search: https://archive.org/details/tucows_194462_HotDog_Professiona...

I learned HTML in my first years of highschool building pages in Frontpage and Dreamweaver and inspecting the source code. At the time flash seemed more promising so it was only years later, during the CSS Zen revolution that I learned proper HTML and CSS. Until then I learned flash and ecmascript to make dynamic websites in flash.

As highschoolers with absolutely zero web experience, it was peanuts publishing to the web. You could find guides on how to publish to things like geocities or other hosts (silly things like 50meg.com) everywhere. Sure we had some time, but we didn't have to put much effort in learning.

I call them average. My buddies and I were all starting up our own sites and fan pages about our favorite cartoons using homestead and geocities before we were teens. Didn't know crud about HTML but WYSIWYG editors existed then too.

I started as a middle-schooler writing html and publishing stuff on the internet. It was my introduction to web development and I was completely non-technical when I started.

I don’t think fewer people publish on their own sites today. There are just more people on the internet.

Globally that's probably true, but I doubt it true in the US as I know plenty of people that used to have personal websites that stopped.

I just stumbled on W3's ActivityPub and hope this takes off. If we can combine the independance of publishing and a way to link stuff together, it might go a long way to reduce our dependency on big platforms.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

>a way to link stuff together

Maybe... hyperlinks via <a> tags?

Last I saw, hyperlinks didn't "provide a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content".

Are there any practical applications of this protocol on the wild, or on paper? This server-to-server communication reminds me of email in a good way. It could open a door for websites to talk to each other without Facebook or Twitter chaperoning the whole thing.

Federated microblogging: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

Distributed video streaming: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

I don't think Mastodon has implemented ActivityPub yet, does it?

Mastodon has switched to ActivityPub already

yes, me too, WebSub (previously PubSubHubbub) https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ and Scuttlebutt https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt are in this space too with slightly different aims but a common cause of bringing ownership over content into the users control.

I'm optimistic that the move of computing into mixed reality (VR/AR) will be a grand opportunity to re-capture this spirit. But instead of making their own pages, people will be making their own places and things.

Heh, I wish. What I see is probably another walled garden.

I think the main difference was regular people used to write HTML as far as into the myspace days. Now they just share photos and write posts in broken english or within 140 chars.

Tripod pre-Lycos was an amazing learning space for me in the mid nineties. Domains and hosting were significantly more expensive than they are now (especially for a freshman in high school) and Tripod was an amazing lifeline. Little did I know that my time spent building fan sites for punk rock bands more than 20 years ago would end up having such a significant impact on my career even today.

That said, I'm ashamed of all the sites that I built with Image Maps and Frames and glorious tables!

It really is sad that the rise of the social media has meant that so many people will not have the opportunity to have this type of experience in learning front end development from the ground up.

Me too! I just went to look for my old Tripod site, and it's still there!

http://bratschenspieler.tripod.com/index.htm

It is not lost. There are still plenty of tools that helps individuals publish their own web content, yet most people would simply post on social media now.

I think most people only want to get their ideas published. Whether it is in the form of tweets, blogs or their own sites, it does not matter much. If social media were available in this early era, average people wouldn't need to publish their own sites.

Which era was that? Back in the 90s average people did not post anything to the Internet _at all).

I miss it too. Also, these sites make me nostalgic and for some reason they look precious.

Or how about: "to publish, rather than promote..."?

I still have a site of this sort: a site I used to publish, which I created in the very early 2000s using my 90s html knowledge. It still uses frames.

> represents a period of time where average people used the open Web to publish

Come on, you know publishing can’t work without a paywall or your adblocker turned off, everyone knows that.

Publishing can work without those things. What's not clear is that journalism can. It is expensive to groom primary sources and investigate stories. I'm quite happy that at least a few organisations seem to have figured out a model by which they can fund such things. Otherwise it would be very difficult for me to know anything true about the world outside my immediate friends and family.

Print journalism worked fine when it was local owned, up to 3 papers.

TV journalism worked fine when it was local owned, 30 mins on up to 3 channels.

My comment is present tense. I'm talking about what can work now, not what worked in the past.