Outsider web

The Outsider web is alive and well.

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The web designer and developer Jim Nielsen commented on a quote from the Security/Devops engineer Mat Duggan about the Fediverse… apparently a “social network that half the internet has never heard of”.

No source for this claim is cited so allow me make up my own statistic in response: Half the Internet has heard of the Fediverse but decided it is not for them as they are not techy people and do not wish to join one of the gated communities they are building for themselves so they can keep reassuring each other what a great job they are doing… even if some of them struggle to resize a window.

To quote from an earlier piece by Mat Duggan regarding a browser extension he had created:

“Interestingly one of my most common requests is “I would like less technical content” which as it turns out is tricky to provide because it’s pretty hard to find.”

The clues are all there. Let’s see if they can figure it out.

Personal outsider web sites

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In her defense of unpolished personal websites Ana Rodrigues opined:

all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code.

Splendid. Let’s take a look:

A page of dense code for a web site

Hmmm!

We should not forget that browsers will happily render a text file (someText.txt) and combined with a simple drag and drop access point like Transmit‘s Docksend it should be easy to be on the web. This was how things worked in the days of yore. Your account with an ISP came with some ‘web space’. The ISP account would put an icon on your desktop onto which you dragged your files and they automagically appeared on the web.

The punk rock scene in the UK of the late 1970s was a move against the self-indulgent, bloated excesses of established musicians and the music industry. Of course it did not last and the status quo was soon reestablished but there was a re-setting of attitudes. Perhaps one day the web will experience something similar and people will reclaim it as their own.