Reach Out - 18/11/24

"And reach out! And reach out! And reach out! And reach out! And-"

It's 2020 and I'm 16. I've been feeling crushed by an increasingly exploitative Web, and so I've started getting interested in things such as Linux, digital minimalism, privacy, and most importantly for this post: what I will refer to as the "underground Web", like "underground music scene", because the other terms don't fully satisfy me.
Another thing that drove my interest in the underground Web was a nostalgia of a time before the Web had become a bleak hellscape comprised of "minimal" and "sleek" websites. The first time I witnessed such a thing was in 2013 at 9 years old, with Youtube's "One Channel" redesign, which removed pretty much all customization options from channels and unified them under one design, I remember absolutely loathing this change and trying to search online for a way to go back, much to my dismay there wasn't.

And so I sign up on Neocities with very ambitious plans, a site with fully-illustrated pages and music, whose browsing experience could be compared to roaming around in DaimConne's TF2 Maps (Showcase on YT, epilepsy warning tho).
Of course, this is a big project that I'm about to take on, and I barely know how to write in HTML, so for the time being, I'm just gonna write "WIP Bruh" in index.html :)
And so, this site joined and stayed on the pile of abandonned websites with pretty much nothing for 4 years.
Murid and Mike Gridle both argue that websites like this should not be looked down upon, as they are learning experiences for the young webmasters.
I agree with this sentiment, without learning about these alternative solutions, I would not be where I am, however I didn't really do much with these ideas for years, and I think that's because I didn't fully internalize the single most important thing that sets all these things apart from their mainstream counterparts.

To me, it seems the problems which the youth face nowadays is very different than what it was in the past.
Back then, the young fought against excessively rigid social structures in order to express themselves freely.
But now, the young are struggling to find a coherent sense of belonging in a world of confused and garbled noise.
Large social media corporations are not only the source of this problem, they also precipitate it. They exploit this yearning for meaning and community in order to turn a profit.
Social media is purposefully designed to constantly feed you a stream of short-form content and opinions which you can only passively consume and scroll through, you cannot interpret and build upon what you see, and the only way you can "engage" with the content is by leaving some short comment.
You can't actually communicate in a meaningful way, you can only perform some strange and macabre simulacrum of socialization, social media is profoundly anti-social.

The greatest quality of the underground Web is that it's not designed for attention retention, engagement, SEO or any other of that profit-chasing garbage.
You can actually express ideas thoroughly.
You can actually have some breathing room to think about what you're reading.
You can actually have meaningful interactions with others.
You can process those things into fuel for your own creations.
I think all of these things should be actively encouraged and nurtured.
If you want to start a website but are afraid that your ideas are not good enough, remember that pretty much anything can be interesting if explored with enough depth and passion, and if you are also afraid that you can't do that, remember that this is a skill that can be trained and improved upon as you do it.
If you want to reach out to other webmasters, try to not heed the voice that tells you that you're just embarrassing yourself.
If you try to end up avoiding the pain of reaching out and being vulnerable, you will end up suffering from regret instead.

Afterword

It was pretty tough writing this """essay""".
I initially tried to figure it out as I went along, like I usually do, but when writing stuff like this you need to know how to order and organize your ideas in advance.
I even considered going with like a mindmap or some shit, instead I just worked backwards from the """thesis""".

I'm kinda scared that this is incoherent, basic, or rambling.
I still don't think I got my idea across as best as I could.
I'm hesitant to even call this an essay.
But hey, now I know that whenever I'm feeling this way, a re-watch of that last video is in order :P
I'm also worried that I don't have enough experience to write so confidently about this, but it's less about that and more to remind myself how I should proceed in the future (think of it as an expansion to Mission Statement).