The small, real, original web

I'm still running multiple email systems the "old way". Been doing it for 30 years and don't intend to stop now, both at work and at home.

There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.

The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.

Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.

The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.

I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.

Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.

But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..

The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.

Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with:

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy

Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.

Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469

It took less effort to setup a geocities page than a myspace account.

The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.

Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound.

Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)

The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.