The return of Web 1.0

Or maybe it never went away completely.

October 2014 Gizmodo story titled The Great Web 1.0 Revival

"We're tired of being told what to do, what to see, and how to interact online by platforms that resemble rat mazes more than sandboxes."

Paul Ford, a writer, editor, and programmer, launched Tilde as "a pure lark," ...

Because Tilde's content isn't as open to the internet at large, it's easier to be earnest.

"People have more fun when they can be vulnerable and open," Ford explained to me in an email. Especially when they "aren't bracing themselves for a bunch of shrieking assholes to violently weigh in on every possible thing in order to score more virtual rage points."

The appeal of a tighter content ecosystem is clear when any public tweet might be singled out by an internet terror machine like Gamergate.

Threats of hate-group trolling and hacking make a return to a safer time even more appealing. Facebook, Twitter, and Ello don't do enough to protect their users, but smaller social networks can self-police.

Tilde isn't even really a social network, and it's particularly difficult to make your own version, Ford pointed out. It's "a shared Unix computer on the internet. You could boot up a new Tilde.Club on any Mac," he wrote. The site is more of a web-hosting service in the mold of Web 1.0 darlings like Geocities, Tripod, or Angelfire, which have also been coming back into fashion—see the name-checking throwback Neocities, where users can build simple websites with the help of code tutorials.

But requiring even minimal skills or a personal invite keeps niche communities semi-exclusive. Tilde is invitation only; the majority of its active users are part of a smallish media-focused social circle highly active on Twitter.

But returning to online cliques isn't a perfect answer. Foster learned as much with Kuro5hin. "Managing an online community is the most difficult thing I've ever tried to do," he said. "The hardest part is that eventually you face the need to exclude someone." And if you don't, you risk running into the same problems facing the mainstream internet today. The decisions on who to allow in "get made by default in favor of the loudest and most aggressive members, and eventually that's all your community consists of," Foster said.

It's not a bad thing that the web has become democratized. It creates room for many spaces of all different sizes. Tight, Web 1.0-style communities gain in intimacy but they lose in creating open dialogue because they are limited by necessity. Whether it's by intention, absence of invitations, or lack of an opportunity to learn basic coding, some users are left out, and we might end up regretting it.

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