Search Engine Deoptimization and e-Baristas!

Hello and welcome to the second issue of FROM THE SUPERHIGHWAY! This month, we’re going to a look at the websites that Big Google™️ doesn’t want you to see, get an A+ in astral projection, and take a deep dive into the labyrinthine world of the Fediverse - all capped off with an interview with the lovely folks down at 32bit.cafe! Let’s get started.

>: marginalia, wiby, and the fight against SEO

The enshittification of Google Search has been long in the making - but it’s recent dip in quality is truly unprecedented. I’ve already written a little bit about the situation over on Down The Ladder, but what I didn’t include in that original piece is any kind of alternative that you could use instead.

For the “same internet, but with more privacy,” there’s always DuckDuckGo, but the “same internet” at this stage also unfortunately includes AI bullshit. Instead, I’ve been plumbing the depths of link depots and Github write-ups for some potential alternatives - and while I’ve stumbled a few interesting finds there, the two most promising options are Marginalia and Wiby - coming courtesy of our first submission! (send us more at [email protected]!)

First, I want to stress: neither of these options are going to be suitable for everyday use as a primary search engine - neither of them are capable of fulfilling that role, nor are they really trying to (If you’re trying to disable the new AI overviews on Google Search, refer to this Reddit thread - worked like a charm for me!). Instead, they are more highly-specialized options specifically geared to give you results that are not search engine-optimized, which typically means sites that are older, text-heavy, and lightweight, instead of sites that are “modern” (derivative), “visually striking” (cluttered), and “cutting-edge” (bloated).

Wiby is the option more geared towards “classic” results, and Marginalia is the option that is broader in scope, focusing more on contemporary websites and articles. And the best part of both: no hallucinating AI overviews in sight! I highly recommend you play around with both of these - it’s extremely novel and interesting to interface with a search engine whose #1 priority is delivering you information you want to see, instead of rewarding keyword shuffling games and AI slop.

>: SELF, and the art of the neo-flash game

One of the largest bastions of creativity on the modern internet is indie distribution platform itch.io. it’s there that you will find the absolute cutting-edge of experimental horror, interactive storytelling, and game design! I already have an enormous curated collection of recommendations that I plan to sprinkle out over the next few issues, but I wanted to keep things (relatively) simple to start - so for this month I selected SELF, a 2D action platformer about astral projecting yourself to the end of over two dozen hand-designed levels.

SELF is a great example of the sort of game I can remember getting obsessed with while browsing Newgrounds in the days of yore. As a child with $0 to his name, finding free, tightly-designed games in the wild for free always felt like striking gold - and as an adult with $0 to his name, it feels just as invigorating, if not more! I highly recommend you check it out - as well as the rest of the games I’ve collected in my bangers playlist.

>: this month’s reading: into the fediverse

If you’ve been paying attention to developments in and around social media, you’ve probably at least heard the word “Fediverse”, probably in-reference to Mastodon, Threads, or other services that are “federating.” You’ve probably also thought to yourself, “I have no idea what that means.”

Luckily for you (and for me while writing this issue), The Verge has written up an excellent explainer about the topic here. I highly recommend you give it a read. It’s extremely accessible, even to non-technical audiences, and understanding of what the Fediverse is will give you a greater appreciation for what our featured interview subjects are bringing to the table. Speaking of that…

>: this month’s feature - chatting with the baristas of 32bit.cafe!

Though the term “indie” may conjure up images of tortured auteurs or scrappy loners, one of the most remarkable things that I’ve noticed about the indie web is how many institutions it has: clubs, fanlistings, webrings, art collectives, and many more novel and unconventional kinds of communities on the web. One such unconventional community is 32bit.cafe - a collective of developers, artists, and educators building the social and technological infrastructure of the indie web - and teaching people had to use it. Earlier this week, I had a lovely chat with the “baristas” of the cafe - namely, alexandra, kaylee, key, jay, flaMEd, and yequari - and asked them about their approach to sustainability, education, and, of course, their predictions for the future of the web.

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?: Of the spaces I’ve encountered across the indie web, 32bit.cafe is among the ones most focused on education. In your estimation, what’s the technical skill level of the average person stumbling into the cafe? Are they already familiar with basic programming, or are they total newbies? How much do they tend to improve?

jay: I think for the most part, people just jumping into the cafe are very new at web design for fun, but the range of technical experience is super broad… We get people who have very little technical knowledge, people who made websites as a kid and want to get back into it, experienced programmers and people that do this sort of thing as their day job. I think the broad range of experience really helps those who are newer to the whole thing get a lot of experience very quickly, because there’s so many perspectives and skill-levels to learn from. I know that’s really helped me.

yequari: It’s awesome seeing people start out small and build their skills up, and eventually they can help out the next wave of newbies. Sometimes it’s easier to learn from someone that is at a skill level just slightly above yours, so I think that being possible within the cafe is really great.

key: I think like with any hobby there’s some fall-off as people move on to other interests, but for those that stick with it, I think they can and often do improve a great deal. Personally I find having the community to turn to helps a lot when I’m stuck on something I don’t fully understand and I see that a lot with other members as well.

alexandra: it’s really nice to have a variety of skill levels in our community because i think it makes us all better, regardless of experience. personally, i know that i’ve had a different perspective on coding problems or seeing folks apply tags in an off-label way, just from interacting with other hobby web developers, some brand new to this, who are using their fresh eyes to apply things differently; and i’ve been making websites since 1998.

i also want to touch on what you lead in with. i think at the crux of our community is a general understanding that most people tend to be motivated to get better in encouraging, judgment-free environments. there was a study i found early on in this 32-bit cafe journey about the effects of encouragement on learning on students who were studying the german language. it found that being in an encouraging environment didn’t inherently make them better at the language; instead, encouragement affected their ability to believe in themselves and motivated them to practice and get better at the language. those who were discouraged, teased, or bullied ended up losing motivation and interest in german—never wanting to practice and actually improve. i’ve been in a lot of different environments, both offline and online, that were not encouraging to inexperienced coders. there’s just not a lot of places to coexist with others in these technology-centric hobbies that are positive and encouraging relentlessly, really, and we need more of them.

?: I see that you’ve recently started a Pixelfed instance - if you were talking to a layman, what would you say the key differences are between Fediverse services like Pixelfed and Mastodon and their mainstream counterparts (Instagram and Twitter)? What, if anything, would you say to someone to persuade them to switch?

key: I’d say the primary difference between Fediverse and mainstream is the concern with branding, and with clout. I know personally Pixelfed feels less formal, a place where I’m sharing more with friends. It doesn’t feel as if everything has to be highly polished before publishing. So overall there’s less pressure to perform for an audience that expects perfection.

alexandra: key nailed it. it’s less of sending your photos or microblogs out into the void and more sharing with a closer-knit group of people. instagram is like the party in the ballroom, and pixelfed is like the parties up in the rooms. you can invite who you want or open it up to anyone, but you can keep the door closed if you’d like. honestly, i don’t think these tools are for everyone; you kind of have to be fed up with your data being commodified or contributing to social media culture in general or being around negativity with access to trolls constantly. only because there’s a layer of a learning curve here, there’s less folks, picking an instance can be daunting if you’re not sure what’s going on; there’s multiple reasons that could be unappealing to someone, and they might just want to yell into the void.

yequari: The fediverse seems to encourage interaction between users as the primary way of using each service. There’s no algorithm, so new posts and users are discovered “naturally” through boosts (retweets), hashtags, and replies. This approach gives you a lot of control in curating your feed, which is what I would say the main difference is between fediverse services and mainstream social media, and is what I would point out to someone interested in checking out the fediverse to persuade them to make the jump. The mainstream platforms want to keep you on their platform as long as possible so they can make you look at more ads. Their interfaces and algorithms are optimized for that goal, regardless of whether that’s what you actually want as a user, but that incentive simply doesn’t exist on the fediverse, so your experience depends on how you interact with the network.

fLaMEd: On the established corporate apps, you’re there to follow brands and be advertised to that’s it. Over on the Fediverse alternatives you’re there to interact with other people. What key is describing above about Pixelfed in particular is exactly what Instagram was back when it first kicked off… A place to share photos, with your friends, sometimes strangers, and leave a comment or two. Now, what I see when I look over my wife’s shoulder is ads, influencers, and brands telling you what you should buy, how you should feel, and what you should do!

?: I’ve seen some alarm around the closure of sites like cohost, particularly in regards to how independent alternatives to mainstream social media can remain sustainable without enormous quantities of venture capital flowing into them. While your scope is obviously smaller, how does 32bit.cafe approach sustainability with its own self-hosted, presumably-not-free community services (Pixelfed, Pubnix, etc.) - and how would you recommend burgeoning online communities approach the question themselves?

yequari: I think people are taking the wrong lesson away from the cohost situation. If you look at their financial updates, the money they had flowing in from users was more than enough to cover the actual operational costs of the website, which proves to me that independent social media is both something people want and something people are willing to pay for. In that way I would consider it a success, even though their payroll costs ultimately doomed them. As for the 32-Bit Cafe, we’re still fairly small, so the server costs of the services we run is low. Since we’re all volunteers, we don’t have to worry about that payroll aspect, but that does means we have day jobs and a million other things going on in our lives, so time is always at a premium. For that reason, when we think of taking on a new project, we’re always considering what the ongoing time cost will be like. The forum, for example, actually freed up some of our time, because it requires less effort to moderate and it allowed us to pare down the Discord server a bit.

alexandra: paying out-of-pocket for our services has been working for us because i think we all really believe in what we’re doing. we’ve recently opened up donations but only because our community is so generous and asked us repeatedly to so we’re not just paying for everything ourselves. there’s a part of me that also knows that folks will invest more time in if their money is in too, which will help with adding additional projects and services to the cafe. but i think it has to start from the top and the folks who believe in the project to sustain their projects. i think it doesn’t feel fair to start without a plan to sustain your community or service and lean on your community without proving your vision at least somewhat first.

jay: yeah I think if you rely solely on venture capital to sustain your social platform with the hopes that it will simply “become profitable later”, it’s doomed to fail. Non-indie platforms are slowly imploding now, too, after all. It’s hard to say how other online communities should approach this because every community has different needs and wants.

fLaMEd: Agreed, as we’re not doing this to make a living, but rather provide a space online for people to get together and learn about web development and website building as a hobby I reckon we’re in a pretty good place to keep going. The services that we’re spinning up and providing to our members aren’t holding any data hostage, in most cases they can move to an alternative service and carry on.

How to approach it? Just go in with an understanding of what your intentions are. Want to make money? Have a solid business plan. Want to provide services to bring a few people joy and enrich their online experience? Go in knowing that you might have to foot the bill for a couple of things. If you build up your community well enough, there’s always going to be people happy to pitch in and support if they believe in it.

?: In my experience, the question of what role Web 1.0. aesthetics should play in the indie web movement (and if they should play any role at all) remains quite contentious. In your “Our History” section, you say that part of the reason you started 32bit.cafe was a desire to have an indie web space that didn’t focus on those aesthetics. What motivated that desire?

jay: Personally, I do really love that “old web” aesthetic, I definitely lean into it more than some others. But it can be a bit limiting, and it can alienate those who don’t like that. I don’t think the personal web should be an Aesthetic movement, it’s based on shared ideas and the desire to build a better web. By leaning too heavily into retro aesthetics, we’d be leaving out a really large, talented, kind, and important part of our community.

yequari: I think it’s weird that web 1.0 plays a role at all. To me, the indie web movement is about getting people into creating and maintaining personal websites, so I don’t see why web 1.0 aesthetics are relevant. I can understand why people would find the aesthetic appealing and wish to evoke a time when the web as a whole was experimental, but that is a personal design choice and not a defining aspect of the movement.

key: The Web 1.0 aesthetic can certainly be fun, but I don’t feel like it has to be the focus of any small website. Personally I like finding a balance between the fun of those old sites and the more structured, generally easier to navigate design of more modern sites.

alexandra: nostalgia definitely can help bring in folks to create their own website (especially since y2k is very on-trend at the moment), but it doesn’t sustain a community that’s actually trying to progress forward. frankly, i don’t care if someone’s site looks like an angelfire site from 1999 or a 2001 geocities drag-and-drop spread or using a modern framework. just create your own site and stake out your part of the web!

fLaMEd: For me, that part of the web was a very small time for me. It was a time and place to start playing around with HTML and then I was looking for ways out of GeoCities. The 2000s aesthetic (not Y2K) was my favorite era of the web, photoshop layouts, sliced and painstakingly forced into an HTML layout.

Sure there are parts of that era that play a role in the current movement, the buttons, webrings, links pages, etc, they existed outside of and past GeoCities and play a big part in website discovery and community building.

But as key mentioned above it can be fun when applied right, just look at their Mighty Ducks and Invader Zim fansites, they’re so good!

If we can take anything from that time, it’s the spirit of the web, get out there and start building your own place on the web outside of the corporate silos. Make it look how you want, at the end of the day, it’s your space, you do you!

?: What do you think the next ten years have in store for the web?

jay: I think we’re at a really exciting point for the web (and technology as a whole)! the initial allure and excitement around mainstream social media is starting to fade, people are taking a closer look at their internet usage and what they want to get out of it… The “original” main social media platforms are starting to hit a wall with profitability, so everything’s sort of imploding. I hope something good comes out of all of it. I think there’s a chance for some really unique and interesting projects to shine.

yequari: Just like the web of 10 years ago was significantly different from the web of today, I think the web 10 years from now will be very different as well. There is a lot of chaos going on right now with the current major players of the web. The promises of web 2.0 have been broken, web 3.0 never replaced it, tech giants are facing antitrust litigation, and their heavy investment into AI is not showing to be as profitable as they hoped. I think the web is in position for a big shakeup to happen as result of this chaos. How that will all work out in the end is impossible to say, but what is clear is that federated services like Mastodon have been growing and there is increasing interest in personal websites, so I hope the paradigm shifts back in that direction again.

alexandra: gosh, 10 years is a long time on the internet, i think. i’m excited about what’s to come, though. i think we’ve seen a lot of globalization through the internet’s spread, for better or worse, and the enshittification of everything with AI, data markets, and big tech in general. i think more people are going to end up wanting these smaller communities tailored to their interests as time goes on. what i hope happens is that things circle back around to a more experienced version of the techno-optimism in america of the ’80s and ’90s, where we consider the scope of what the internet can accomplish and actually work on that together, rather than relying on the same five companies for every aspect of our digital experience. or we won’t, and this side of the web will get increasingly punk (and, ergo, cooler if media has taught us anything). i hope that in 10 years more people will consider building websites more of an artistic medium, one that is accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

fLaMEd: The corporate silos are going to raise the height of their walls higher. A new wave of people who have been living with whatever is being shoved down their throats are going to realize they’re sick of it and want for a better experience online…

Optimistically I hope that we see a reverse from convergence on the corporate platforms and local community function is brought back locally. I shouldn’t need to have a FaceBook account to know whether my kids sports game is cancelled or not.

>: endnotes and further reading!

• Thanks again to the fine folks over at 32bit.cafe! I only scratched the surface of everything they do. Go check out their stuff - and if you want to participate, follow my lead and join their forum and Discord server.
• Thanks again to Æweired who introduced me to Marginalia and Wiby - if you want to submit finds for a future issue, send them to [email protected]!
• Say hello to our newest member of the webring: Orlando-based art and barter event Goblin Market! If you want a slot in the webring, head on over to the Patreon! Membership now includes bonuses for my other projects, including early videos and exclusive content for Down The Ladder.