> Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.
Definitely! There's a lot of that sentiment over at Micro.blog [1], which has built a community of writers & indie software developers (especially developers from the RSS era, if you've heard of MarsEdit or NetNewsWire). There's an emphasis on personal blogging, keeping things simple, and using dedicated desktop/mobile apps (usually made by solo/indie developers) for each task, instead of the website. And as part of the IndieWebCamp [2] projects, there's even people making web rings again [3] as well.
There was also a search engine someone showed on HN recently, that didn't have a crawler - the only pages listed were the specific pages (not domains!) that people submitted to the index. That gave the searches some serendipity, you never found what you searched for but stumbled on something that someone else thought was interesting anyway.
Definitely! There's a lot of that sentiment over at Micro.blog [1], which has built a community of writers & indie software developers (especially developers from the RSS era, if you've heard of MarsEdit or NetNewsWire). There's an emphasis on personal blogging, keeping things simple, and using dedicated desktop/mobile apps (usually made by solo/indie developers) for each task, instead of the website. And as part of the IndieWebCamp [2] projects, there's even people making web rings again [3] as well.
There was also a search engine someone showed on HN recently, that didn't have a crawler - the only pages listed were the specific pages (not domains!) that people submitted to the index. That gave the searches some serendipity, you never found what you searched for but stumbled on something that someone else thought was interesting anyway.
[1] https://micro.blog
[2] https://indieweb.org/
[3] http://th3core.com/talk/traffic/i-made-a-web-ring-5-days-ago...