We really like personal sites but the internet has been turning into poisonous garbage at an alarming rate

Part of me wants to talk about how fun the internet was when it was just websites. But we barely had tags then, let alone hashtags. Much like the “Y2K Garage Sale” that happened down the street from me, any nostalgia I have for that time is selective memory indelibly colored by all the work that we did to improve things since the early 2000s. I remember enjoying reading the internet much more back then, but writing it felt much worse.

It might be snappier to say that this project came out of “a love for the way the web used to be” or something like that, but that’s not quite it. People are making beautiful, compelling work on the internet maybe more than ever. I feel like I’ve found some of my favorite projects this year. So why does using internet feel like being trapped in a garbage dump most of the time??

Trying to answer this question is definitely part of what led to Octothorpes, if indirectly.

Besides the obvious answers, primary among them that huge monopolies have tried very hard to make it this way, I have two theories that have been driving me.

First Theory: Our expectations of the internet have been colonized

When I think of the experience of reading the internet that I miss, I realize it had a lot in common with reading zines, which were also a much bigger part of my life then. A certain lack of professionalism in content and delivery was to be expected. There were some memes, but most sites had a distinct personal voice, and it was also a reading experience more than it was a scrolling experience.

The high-water-mark for me was having a daily web-comic reading ritual. I could have subscribed to their RSS feeds, but I had a sequence I liked to read them in and I could go from one to the next by clicking the “other good comics” links in their footers. I’m just now realizing that maybe the best part of this ritual was that after it, I would leave my computer and go do other things for the rest of the day. 🤔

After Web 1.0, we drifted away from the idea that you could usually read all or most of something you liked on the internet. When you did, sometimes it was hard to find more. Crucially you often had to look for the good stuff – it wasn’t just piped into your brain endlessly. Recommendations came from people, both friends or the authors of the material you were reading. All of this became an anathema when we shifted gears up to Web 2.0 on the infobahn.

The best articulation of that shift that I’ve read is The Garden and the Stream. A garden is something you return to, either to tend or enjoy, while a stream rushes by forever. This is one of the originating points of the concept of “digital gardening” and I was among the people moved by it to make one. In fact I went deeper to turn it into a memex of sorts.

There are so may things we used to assume about putting things on the internet that quietly slipped away in the shift from the garden to the stream. This list can also be called “Things That Are Not True About Instagram.” Some of these things are true about some of the big sites, less so when you use their app, but I wonder for how long.

Things we assumed about the internet during Web 1.0

• If you want to put some thing on the internet, you put them on websites
• You have to Go Online to see websites.
• This means you can Go Offline
• Web pages had URLs
• Web pages loaded, and then you had a web page
• “Having” a website means, mostly, owning a website and the things on it
• You can open larger versions of scaled images
• If you post something, it’s not going to disapper on its own unless you delete it
• You can copy text
• You can click on all links
• You can download things you want to save
• Websites don’t make your phone ding or vibrate
• No one is remotely monitoring your browsing activity
• You don’t scroll to discover things, you browse or “surf”
• Recommendations come from people
• Scrolling ends

I miss all of these. However, these things I don’t miss:

• Posting takes significant effort, money, and special knowledge
• Email or messy comment sections are the only way to connect with people posting stuff you liked
• Accessibility was nonexistent
• Links rot and standards change quickly
• Other than StumbleUpon, most connections are manually maintained (webrings, link lists, blogrolls)
• A lot of people didn’t feel welcome or like they could find people to connect with

And of course, some of these are often still the case.

This isn’t a unique – or complete – list of values for an open internet. A lot of people are thinking about this. The Manifesto for a Humane Web is a great start towards that list of values, and almost everything else I’d link to is in their “further reading” or “references” section.

My list is just what I try to remind myself about the discomfort I feel with the way it feels to post on the Internet of Today. That it’s not inevitable or necessary to give up the things on the first list to change the things on the second. I think we’ve just been upsold and enshittified into living on processed slop when we actually have better tools than ever to go out and garden for ourselves.

So that’s one reason we’re building Octothorpes – to make it easier to have an internet like the first list without the stuff on the second list.

Part two: We got used to talking to the internet itself instead of people on the internet