in the fall of 2021, when the web3 buzz was its loudest, and momentum seemed to be inevitably propelling us (with the backing of every venture capital cash firehose) toward a future of unescapable wallets and microtransactions and content gating, i tweeted:

Web1 was a bunch of pages with names like “Dan’s Web Site” made from raw unstyled HTML and it contained a 16x16px gif of a shooting star and 3 paragraphs of bright blue text about Nickelodeon shows and people keep trying to convince me that things have improved since then

on my old realname account it was maybe the most engagement i ever got, scoring a fav from a new york times tech reporter and making waves for a day or so. it was fun to reminisce but what’s dead is dead, the corporations won and now we do all of our posts on a handful of mega platforms and that’s it. maybe it’ll all be tokens soon, who knows.

but then twitter began to crumble into a pile of dust and some people started to wonder where they should post if the chaotic maelstrom at the center of the internet ever stopped spinning. sure, mastodon is a thing, but many of us started to think back to the web1 days and dream of owning our experience once again.

it’s been beaten into the ground that if a web2 product is free, the product is you, but that’s not the complete picture. sure, your eyeballs are important resources to sell to advertisers, but your content is also critical for getting more eyeballs. so you make content that brings more eyeballs and are rewarded with updoots and retoots and maybe a boost from the algorithm to put your very nice content in front of more people, alongside an ad. infinite growth is the name of the game in this economy, so once the dopamine wears off you build a following and start to monetize your audience and they smash that subscribe button and up their patreon and at the peak, companies just give you cash directly for posts. so that’s a thing you can do, if you want.

of course these market pressures are toxic and antisocial at every level, incentivizing individual actors and companies to maximize attention at all times, leading to truly bizarre behavior. large platforms now have entire enterprises devoted to pumping out content designed to frustrate and confuse you, because you might hate it but you’ll watch til the end and then complain in the comments. so what exactly are we doing here?

web2 started innocently enough. facebook just moved dorm room social webs online, and presented a more polished interface than myspace, who for one shining moment got teenagers to learn css. twitter fully backed into realizing that people want to post “ate a sandwich” and became the hivemind of the internet, and reddit absorbed digg and every web1 forum in epic bacony fashion. they all run on the same resource: we want to express ourselves and be heard and meet new people and feel connected to each other and the world. we want to learn fun facts and see cool pictures and hear awesome music and laugh at funny jokes and partake in human culture. we want to love and be loved. and a bunch of public companies zooted up on infinite financing took all that and alchemized it into stock buybacks and yachts. we got something out of it, but it was more often than not a crude facsimile of the thing we thought we were getting.

so anyway. it seems good and right to not just jump to another huge platform where the experience is controlled by people working at cross purposes. mastodon is a step in the right direction, but you’re still at the mercy of the mods, and the whole “fediverse” (i beg you think of a better name for this) introduces friction to the experience. the secret sauce of the web2 value prop is the simple signup form. no credit card required (unless you want 2fa) and if your username is unique you’re in. it gets more complicated the farther from big central platform you get, and many have given up on mastodon at the first mention of “server instances”. but if it gets more complicated as you decentralize, why not go all the way?

it is not free to make a website. there is a wide spectrum of cost, with one end being easy and quick but expensive, and the other being almost or entirely free of charge but with a massive amount of time and effort required. i chose the latter, and it took getting fired from my job to find the time necessary. not everyone can take this step, but maybe we can build some tools to help. web3 is running a parallel track, and following the spectacular crypto/nft collapse of 2022 i have found them to be much more friendly on the back foot. but the goal is the same: harnessing miraculous technology to give to and get from each other true connection and purpose.

so welcome to my web site. i’m going to continue to build it and put things on it and link to other web sites i like and i hope you come and visit. you can even subscribe to my rss feed if you want.

shooting star gif to follow