Early sites like GeoCities attempted to recreate a sense of place with neighborhoods. This wasn’t really successful.
Web directories like DMOZ have struggled to maintain quality and stay up to date.
Today I was browsing around the event page for a pixel art festival, Pixel Art Park. Maybe because of its proximity to nerd culture many of the pixel artists, musicians, and game developers exhibiting there have websites linked from their profiles on the event page.
If you view that collection of links as a web directory, it’d be among the best web directories.
Physical space is limited, traveling has a cost, and AI can’t sit at a booth: hosting a physical event is necessarily an act of curation.
id love it if there were more opportunities to present digital creations in physical spaces! there’d be no worries about scraping and you’d be able to interact with people directly.
While I agree with your point, I have to take exception to your first example - Geocities with its funky neighbourhoods worked like a charm until it got hollowed out and destroyed from without. But like I said, I agree with your overall point.
It’s why I’m so enamored of the Internet Phone Book and why I was so adamant to go to its release party - to meet some of these fellow enthusiasts in real life, what an odd and exhilarating thing! I wonder if a personal website conference, or an IRL smallweb café could be in the cards. Start small and see where it goes.
Have there ever been (attempted) meetups through this forum, I wonder.
omg yes! xoxo fest was like this in the states but they’re no longer around. i want there to be more indie/small web conferences and conventions we could meet up at.
i want to plan one of these, but i think the main issue is sponsors. xoxo was done very well and still struggled deeply with logistics and funds. organizing this stuff is expensive :(
not exactly the same thing, but it’s my dream to one day visit an internet yami ichi. it’s a gathering of people who sell “internet-ish things”, such as my personal favorite, big data. though these seem to be tied to general internet culture, so i wonder what webmasters on the indie web would bring to a real world table. imagine webmasters making stickers out of their 88x31 buttons and handing them out to you in an event… i wanna rep my favorite sites on my laptop and notebooks!
i love meetings around kind of “niche” interests but the big problem is that people with these interests are often very spread out which makes it harder to gather in one place. sometimes i feel like this:
honestly i think about this a lot and i think our biggest barrier is location:( even the mod team is so spread out. One of the strengths of our community i feel is how diverse and worldwide it really is compared to a lot of other spaces online, but thats also a detriment when you want to meet up with folks irl!
I’d love even just a one-off ‘small web/indie web’ culture focused convention/meetup/whatever honestly. As a kid i yearned for internet cafes but I came of age way too late to actually go to one (in the US). Just need a low stress place where we can nerd out and help each other with websites and brainstorm and rubber duck off of each other :)
I feel like VR is really good for online hangouts that are closer to real life… but you trade the barrier of distance for the barrier of cost. VRChat is free, but headsets are not.
That’s why you have to start small - do a location poll and find out if anyone lives near anyone to begin with. If it’s a meetup of four people and it’s a game of miniature golf, that’s fine too. Who knows - if there’s a few smallweb meetups across the globe, they could all be one time things or they could grow into something bigger.
Maybe I’ll do a little poll, see if we can plan the first 32bit Cafe IRL Trip Dutch Edition - see how far we get. We’ll workshop the name.
hmmm regional meetups are a good idea actually… i will have to contemplate more and probably revisit when my life isn’t quite so hectic and travel is more feasible!!
