That's great but there's a step 2. The sub-culture of people who like things better that way need to sustain each other and itself. Ideally, to grow in happiness and other measures of strength such that the surrounding dominant culture cannot destroy it, and in fact can influence the dominant culture to become more like it. It's that step 2 that I think we haven't figured out yet. Without step 2 we are merely opinionated nerds that are easily isolated and alienated and ignored.

I think step 2 has been figured out a long time ago: personal not for profit blogs and sites with an rss feed and a "links" section (preferably divided by interests). Such sites still do exist, but usually around various hobbies.

Yeah but we need a name and a recognizable advocacy position. The open web, the indie web, minimalists, even luddites are related terms, but nothing really fits. Then there is the community, the scene - like a webring, but better. Dignified, driven by a simple, solid technical aesthetic, capable, self-sufficient, independent, rational, (classic) liberal, etc. Those are some adjectives I associate with these ideas. I don't know the answer, I'm thinking out loud. (I was excited by the indieweb label but it sounds good but its off-putting with levels of compliance and weird microformat stuff. It's not focused on the important universal qualities and distracted by details of technical implementation.).

How about “sustainable web”?

It could surf a bit on already established efforts in other domains and the narrative seem to fit with those ideas I think.

The small web?

The basic web? hear me out... why has hacker news remained steadfastly under the radar? in part because it looks like an academic message board of the 90's

If intelligently produced text content is what is needed then perhaps we need to design a format that excludes, if not automatically diminishes, images and videos

How about non-ad web? imo all of the ills come from misaligned incentives to extract ad/marketing money

The Useful Web.

How about Real Intelligence web (RW) or Human Web (HW)?

Slept on it. How about "No Web". It's a pun in english (no and know) and also an oblique reference to Herbert's Dune universe "No Ships", who's interiors are invisible to prescience. A fleet of no ships on an internet with ~6 kwizatz haderachs captures a resistance element. The name is a bit strange, too, attracting the intellectually curious.

web0?

Edit: I have not heard of it before this suggestion, but it turns out that this is something that already exists.

That term leads me to a handful of related sites put together by a 2-person web agency in Ireland. It's the right direction!

https://small-tech.org/

https://web0.small-web.org/

I can get lost for hours some nights surfing that kind of sites on web.archive.org. There is probably more of it there than still live on the web. Go back to 1997 or so on some site on an interesting topic and begin clicking links.

Gemini can also be fun for some mindless browsing, but has only enough content for one or two short visis per week (for better or worse).

I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. The internet itself used to be like this back in the late 90s.

Nowadays 95-99% of the web is the general public which means that it has turned into what TV was - the happy happy box to keep the dummies occupied.

Well I mean welcome to hacker news I guess.

...the angry angry box to keep the smarties occupied.

>>I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds.

If we only could. I'd work for free helping to build it. Count on me.

I just think we don't have to build one. We already had it in 1998. It's still there, buried beneath the landfill.

We just need some sort of "search engine" that can find it. If only such a thing existed.

I know of https://search.marginalia.nu/. However, it's been 2 months and my site hasn't been listed yet, despite what I thought was a good convo with the owner.

Yeah still looking into this. Seems like a bug somewhere.

Overall I have a pretty long pipeline for getting new sites indexed, but should improve when I finish migrating to the new server.

There was something posted recently about websites that are like web 1.0 in design. And they had like a wiki or a search or something. Stuff like this

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club