hey all! realizing now i forgot to post about this project before, but i figure y’all would be interested - in september, i started a project called From The Superhighway, which is a monthly newsletter that provides curated recommendations from the indie web! every month, i write about several interesting projects that i find surfing the superhighway, and i also include a featured interview with a notable artist, developer, or contributor to the space - including folks like melonking and the fine baristas here from 32bit.cafe!
the thing that inspired me to create it was having convos with irl friends about the indie web - whenever i’d find something and share it with them, they were always astonished and surprised that cool things still exist on the internet outside of social media. of course, that’s not big news to present company, but it underscored for me that there was a need for an outlet targeted at folks who weren’t already aware of what was happening on the frontiers of the digital world, and the reactions to FTS have been overwhelmingly positive so far.
for november i interviewed catarinha, the mind behind the hand-drawn choose your own adventure game i-land. i’m putting things together for the december issue, but i’m always open to recommendations from anywhere - especially for potential interview subjects i could talk to in the future! looking forward to hearing what y’all think
I’m currently reworking my website so I can do more hypertextual web fiction there. When I get that going, I’ll be mentioning it here. If if you like it, you can always hit me up for a future issue.
This is wonderful! I can’t believe I haven’t heard of this before. I often don’t go exploring much in the web, but this encourages me to surf more and see what I find!
I think you could potentially look into the admins of small-web communities on Dreamwidth, such as smallweb and fancoded.
You could also look into Fandom Coded, which is a community for (as the name implies) fandom folks who code!
If you’re getting real ambitious, you could try to get in contact with the creator of Neocities, Kyle Drake. I think that an attempt to do so would be extremely valuable right now, considering the fact that there was a recent controversy among Neocitizens with regards to his stance on AI “art”. The statement people were sharing, though, was rather old. I think if you managed to ask him the thoughts on the controversy, and his current thoughts on AI art, it would be super valuable.
Similarly, you could reach out to the creators of Nekoweb for interview. They should be much easier to contact compared to Kyle Drake, because there’s an official Nekoweb Discord server.
These are the folks and groups I can think of off the top of my head!
ty for the recs! as far as the kyle drake thing goes, that is firmly in the “someday” area lmao - i did write a little bit about the penelope ai incident a few months ago when the first flareup happened, but frankly i’m waiting to see how things shake out in the coming year. while i love a good hard-nosed interview, FTS’s main purpose is to convince people to join the indie web. as a result, i want to keep the features pretty upbeat and non-confrontational - bringing drake on specifically to talk about ai stuff definitely veers into more adversarial 60 Minutes territory that might kill the vibe lmao. not ruling it out one day, though!