Week of Mon 2nd Jun 2025

I quickly cobbled together a discord server and sent instructions to those who were interested. The energy and collaboration was instant between the artists. They started to hang out, do art together, share work and experiences and prepare for the exhibitions … But more importantly, friendships were formed and people began to see the power of global interaction through digital platforms. We are still going strong today and currently have a poetry expo, to which anyone can submit an entry.

When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I kept an online journal every single day and posted to a website called Trail Journals. As a result, I had people up and down the East Coast who wrote to us and visited us on the trail. It wasn’t unusual to meet trail groupies who knew all kinds of our fellow hikers from reading their journals. More than a decade later, I am still in touch with people I first met through that journal.

Those early days were about discovery; no one used real names, and data tracking wasn’t a thing. You dialed up, which took ages, and you’d fumble your way through creative spaces chatting with your online friends, who you’d likely never meet. The risk and investment were low, and the reward was high. You were exploring unknown territory a few hours a week, not solidifying your whole identity. You weren’t battling corporate greed or algorithms, and you definitely weren’t spending an arm and a leg. The web was mostly independent forums and small quirky websites. Quite the opposite of today.

With wisdom (and age) I’ve managed to learn in time that all these social groups, regardless of their medium are subject to a set of interaction rules, some written and some only implied, while there are impacted by the cumulative effect of the members social decisions, both as individuals and part of the group.

I can’t count the number of times ideas from events have come from a co-organiser across the events I have run – whether a topic for an event, an opening to an event, the flow of a presentation, or something else. Discussions between organisers help keep events fresh and discussions flowing.

It was convenient, sure. But something was lost. The intimacy of those smaller spaces started to fade. The signal-to-noise ratio went through the roof. While you could find more people, it became harder to find your people, or at least, to have the same kind of focused, tight-knit interactions. The algorithms started to decide what you saw, rather than the curated flow of a smaller, human-moderated community. It felt like the digital equivalent of a bustling, anonymous city replacing a cozy village.

I think of them as places where the feeling of knowing someone is ubiquitous. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but I imagine that interacting in a small web community feels like going for a walk through the neighborhood where you lived for many years: you meet people you haven’t seen for quite a while, see others that you never talked to but know for a long time, and meet some new people who just moved there or are just visiting. There is a feeling of being home, and this is what I also want for my online experience.

Similarly to how scientific ideas can be seen as “graduating” when they become scientific theories, similar evolution can happen with a community. A community reaches its peak when — bit unintuitively — the shared interest is no longer the (main) reason the community stays together.

I want to encourage anyone reading to spend more time in their own small web communities through my own brief stories. Your time on the web is more impactful than you may think, so spend it in spaces that matter to you and, maybe most importantly, better you.

So where do we go now? How do we find people with similar interests in 2025. How do we rebuild small web communities and find each other? Where do the weird, socially awkward teens with highly niche interests go? They probably need this more than me. We need to build something for ourselves, it has started. Blogging is back (it never went away for some), webrings too.

There is plenty of fully warranted criticism on social media now, and there is mountains to be said of what is wrong with it now, but I don’t think social media as a concept was a mistake. It just got too big and influenced by commercial algorithms that didn’t foster great community but engagement metrics instead. I no longer believe it is a good idea for practically the entire population of the planet to be part of the same massive “community”.

This small web community became a big part of my life. It was the place where my online, virtual gang resided. It made me take my first steps writing online for one of the forum’s digital magazines. After a while, I even made it to moderator status for the general games section of the forum—something I was (and still am) quite proud of. Never again has an online community felt like that, no matter how fun my current adventure into blogging and the small, indie web has been so far. It’s nostalgia that speaks here, of course, something that always brings in some extra bonus points.

the closure of any host is a loss for the web, but losing glitch is especially painful because of the creative community it cultivated. the live editor made coding approachable for beginners and students, whose sites are some of my favorites (they’re also the ones i’m most worried about not being backed up). so many sites on glitch seemed to be made just to try out an idea or have fun. there was a remix button! i’ll remember glitch as a place built around generosity, experimentation, and play.

Today, there is always a corporate overlord. There are ads, there are privacy concerns, people are used to a system of reward that fundamentally cripples the possibility of anonymity unless it also drags with it a veil to hide indecency. We have come from a time when the “small web” community did not care for your identity to a time when showing your identity in the open is a singular sign of trustworthiness.

In the face of today’s challenges, it’s important to remind ourselves that there is still humanity left in the world, and we need to stay connected with one another to keep it alive. For ourselves, and for the world.

Because one thing that made me realise is, that all these cool people, they don’t really consider themselves cool. I have a feeling that there is a profound truth hidden there, if I allow myself to accept it. Yet it is the constant source of inspiration. I think the main reason why I switched from mostly blogging to mostly writing fanfiction is simply because this group of people gives me too many ideas. They have amusing ideas and some of their comments makes me think they are alright with me playing with them.

I like the idea of expanding participation in the IndieWeb beyond just the people who own a website, and including non-site-owning readers. Speaking as someone who maintains my own site on the IndieWeb, I love when I see people interact with my writing on social media sites where I POSSE my posts — no webmentions required.

Ds106 has been the most exciting & creative community I’ve belonged to. Hard to describe, in part an aggregation of rss feeds in part a hashtag. DS106 is sometimes described as an open online course and sometimes a cult. It started as a Digital Storytelling course at the University of Mary Washington, but was open to anyone from anywhere to join in a very casual way.

I think what made me stay in these communities, aside from my own motivations, is that not only do these communities know what their purpose is and what their members are, but they have consistent rules and a unified team to enforce them. As I’ve seen time and time again, lack of clarity and consistency can break communities apart. If community goals and guidelines are clear, from the very top to the very bottom, then the community will be rock solid.

You don’t have to fill the pipes all by yourself. Just help things flow. I want to share some of the things we’re doing in the Emacs community so that I can convince you that building plumbing for your community can be fun, easy, and awesome. This is great because enthusiasm spreads.