The web revival is a concept originally by melonking, it is primarily around not bring back the “old web” as such but more creating a new social web where people can create their own customizable spaces where they can be themselves. This customization is in direct opposition to modern corporate “social”¹ media websites like discord requiring you to purchase a subscription in order to customise your profile, or the other sites like facebook, instagram, snapchat or twitter that force you to fit in to their (the corporate) idea of a user. In addition, these corporate websites are now even requiring you to send in your personal data for “children safety” when in all actuality these corporations never cared about the safety of children and are now instead being used as a tool to identify possible political targets. Not to mention all these companies also now using all your messages and post in order to train large language models so they can make more profit off you. But back to the main topic at hand the web revival movement as stated my melonking themselves “is not one single movement” and is instead a loose collection of multiple movement all loosely correlated with eachother. I have listed a few of these below with some examples with the majority of them coming from melonking’s article (i have yet to get that much in to the weeds of web surfing)

• the wild web:

  the wild web is all about creating zines² and art pages in a kind of chatoic punky style. Some example of this are:

  • https://melonland.net/
  • https://n-o-d-e.net/zine/index.html

• Neocities:

  Neocities is a revival of the now defunct yahoo GeoCities where people can create and have someone host their own little website if they dont want to selfhost or use something like cloudflare or github pages.

  • https://neocities.org/
  • https://nolove.neocities.org/
  • https://stone-road.org/

• Net Positive:

  Net Positive is a movement around learning and the encouragement of others, this can be as simple as a recipe or as complex as how to create your own laptop

  • https://32bit.cafe/
  • https://n-o-d-e.net/

• and may more youll just have to surf around and find them

but all these movements have several themes that tied them all together (melonking has a few more but these are the ones I think are the most important):

• make the internet a fun place
• being creative, life is about having fun and bring joy to others do that
• Right to Repair, just like what happened with geocities corporations can take away your ability to do something on something you purchased stop them
• no to web3, web3 is an idea for a new web where AIs roam free and steal all your hardwork, your website is actually an NFT that some MBA just bought for 34 shitcoins just to resell. (i would include more about cryptocurrencies in here but I believe if they werent enshittified by big tech and scammer they would be just as welcome)

However this is only the first part of web revival creating the website, the second part is finding other people websites its like making your own house look pretty then not going to look at anyone elses this also help to create the social aspect of the social web. So my suggestion is to take a look at sites like https://melonland.net/surf-club , https://neocities.org/ , or https://onio.club/ . These are great places to start surfing the web and my suggestion to you is to start by adding a links page to your very own website to start getting connected.

Now why am I joining this movement, its simple it because everything it stands for is thing I already stand for. So to fully hop on the bandwagon my plan is to make this website more fun, “how” you ask, fuck if I know yet but thats the fun part a world of possibilities to splatter across your very screen when you next come back. But some fun idea I am thinking of implementing are, a guess book, maybe a little local chat, some simple javascript games and possibly a full rework to change this website from boring and 2d to a full 3d experience. to start with i have already included And finally to leave off with this microtheme, I believe a quote from banksy fits to this idea of the web revival almost perfectly admittedly it is a long quote

imagine a city where graffiti wasnt illegal, a city where everybody could draw what ever they liked, where every street was a wash with a million colours and little phrases, where standing at a bus stop was never boring, a city that felt like a party where everyone was invited not just the estate agents and barons of big business imagine a city like that and then stop leaning against the wall. its wet

Additional links

• what is web revival : https://thoughts.melonking.net/guides/introduction-to-the-web-revival-1-what-is-the-web-revival
• doco for the banksy quote its right at the end : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZFsbGpleX8
• the video that first introduced me to the web revival idea : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkUgOT22F5s
• image used in hook from here : https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/net-plus-ultra/net-plus-ultra-du-vendredi-10-novembre-2023-4107010

footnotes

Footnotes

1. ive put social in quotation marks here as although these sites did originally focus on social interactions been people (hell I even used it to keep in contact with mates when I move to a different country) they now rely on pushing a feed of low quality slop to keep you engaged in order to pedal more ads to you. Nothing about that is social at all at this point ↩

2. zines are small self-published magazines hence zine ↩