4 ms·

I wonder if there's a desire for a western equivalent with the same rules?

by movedx 3y ago

thequadehunter 3y ago
I sorta doubt it. Anybody who speaks Japanese knows it's really hard to get reliable information on topics searching the Japanese web. You find all these Matome and personal sites that are loose with their sources or unclear with their phrasing. It's interesting because you do actual web "surfing" and learn a lot more interesting things along the way, but it's not good for centralized knowledge or social interaction. Personal sites still exist in the west, but nobody really seeks them out. I think this is because in the west the "web" and "social media" grew into becoming the same thing, while in Japan people still see them as mostly separate entities.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  For some values of "nobody"; this westerner enjoys https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu (in addition to more common engines) and has high hopes for the new site browser: https://search.marginalia.nu/site/bikobatanari.art?view=info https://search.marginalia.nu/site/bikobatanari.art?view=info
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Neocities is also kinda stoking this particular flame. It's niche, but also undeniably both big and diverse.
- GeneralMaximus 3y ago
  > Personal sites still exist in the west, but nobody really seeks them out. The IndieWeb movement, standards like WebMention, services like Neocities, and a growing Fediverse have made it so that there is at least some interest in personal websites in the Anglosphere again. I follow a lot of people in my RSS reader, and there’s a growing community of people regularly writing blog posts, having conversations via their blogs, maintaining digital gardens, and generally building small, niche, non-commercial websites for fun. Not to mention people writing email newsletters. It only appears as if the web today is dominated by corporate interests. It’s true that most people stay within those walled gardens, but there are many people still building things outside of them. A more human web still exists, but you need to specifically go looking for it. I recommend starting with https://ooh.directory https://ooh.directory. If your city has an IndieWebCamp or Homebrew Website Club, you might have good luck there.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I have followed blogs in a few hobbies and interests since the early millennium, and all I see there are bloggers closing up shop left and right, because they claim to be drawing almost no visitors in the walled-garden age. Even when a blog still draws comments, the community who comment may have dwindled to a few obviously autistic or mentally ill people, and their style of commenting probably alienates many who stumble upon the site and might have stuck around. It is only on HN that I see people talk about the indie web outright flourishing. But I suspect what is flourishing is a community of people who came together to identify as an indie-web community. Not people who want to write about a topic (particularly a non-nerd one), get read and commented on by other followers of that topic, but don’t particularly want to be part of a specific indie-web subculture.
- gwervc 3y ago
  > Anybody who speaks Japanese knows it's really hard to get reliable information on topics searching the Japanese web. Really depends on the topic. If you're searching for "water business", the results are amazing: there's pages explaining at length the difference between each subtype of businesses, shop aggregators and ranking, even people discussing the service providers, etc. I agree that that mentioning sources isn't a priority but that's the exact same thing in the West save for research papers.
082349872349872 3y ago
Just realised I know of two possible western equivalents: 1/ private mailing lists — not subscriber newsletters with breathless copywriting, but the now-seemingly-jurassic technology of "group chat" conducted via SMTP. (they're actually better than group chat IMO, as it's usually possible to receive a daily digest instead of individual messages, and no one minds if one revisits a thread from three weeks or three years ago. [three decades would technically be possible, but I have yet to see it happen myself]) 2/ I know of several individuals who keep separate public and "private" (albeit security via obscurity) web presences: the former for ideas they feel are well enough formed for the general public, and the latter for spitballing, shitposting, rag chewing, etc. with implicit convention that by browsing the private site you are at least acknowledging that none of it is "ready for prime time" or "A-side" material, and possibly acknowledging that the writing is meant to be high, rather than low, context.
rambambram 3y ago
I follow a lot of what I call 'dev blogs' via RSS from a lot of people here on HN. My subscription list is hundreds of websites long by now (probably 350), collected over two years or so. I sometimes try to only visit blogs this way for a day, and it's refreshing. No algorithms, no ads. Usually very good and interesting content, all these people have skin in the game by having a domain name, a website and effort put into crafting an interesting read. There comes a time where I don't want to visit any 'regular' social media like FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc. The open web is already social media. It works for what I want, which is text and images and sometimes a small video.
- movedx 3y ago
  Nice! Are you willing to share the list somewhere/somehow? Maybe in a Gist?
  - rambambram 3y ago
    Definitely. I have this list at heyhomepage.com, at the bottom. Right now, it's a list in HTML, but you can browse it. The accompanying OPML file (basically just a list of RSS feeds) doesn't work at the moment, because it's usually populated one by one when I change something. I made all my subscriptions public at once for your request by changing the database. In the future this OPML file will contain all the feeds, with my categories and all. The HTML list contains 900+ feeds, of which more than onethird is what I call a 'dev blog'. But I also found a lot of interesting sites/feeds on HN that I put in other categories, like 'art n design', 'bizz n marketing', 'philosophy n life, 'science n history', etc. You get the gist (pun intended). The category 'photo feeds' is also interesting. It contains feeds with an image in the <enclosure> tag, which makes for a more lively feed when I browse it in the RSS reader of Hey Homepage (my website system for small businesses and individuals). If you send me a message on the contactform over there, I can reply with an .sql file by mail which contains everything. Might be easier for you to transform it into something workable. Also, very recently this kind of blogroll/webring was done by other people on HN. It contains user-uploaded blogs and feeds from HN users. You might want to search for that. My guess is there is a lot of overlap between my list and theirs. Edit: Right now, the HTML list doesn't contain the categories I added. If you really want that, I can add it quickly within a day or so. Also, there's no personal info in the list (it was private), but if you happen to find something, please let me know. ;)

I wonder if there's a desire for a western equivalent with the same rules?

by movedx 3y ago

I wonder if there's a desire for a western equivalent with the same rules?

I sorta doubt it. Anybody who speaks Japanese knows it's really hard to get reliable information on topics searching the Japanese web. You find all these Matome and personal sites that are loose with their sources or unclear with their phrasing. It's interesting because you do actual web "surfing" and learn a lot more interesting things along the way, but it's not good for centralized knowledge or social interaction. Personal sites still exist in the west, but nobody really seeks them out. I think this is because in the west the "web" and "social media" grew into becoming the same thing, while in Japan people still see them as mostly separate entities.

082349872349872 3y ago
For some values of "nobody"; this westerner enjoys https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu (in addition to more common engines) and has high hopes for the new site browser: https://search.marginalia.nu/site/bikobatanari.art?view=info https://search.marginalia.nu/site/bikobatanari.art?view=info
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Neocities is also kinda stoking this particular flame. It's niche, but also undeniably both big and diverse.
GeneralMaximus 3y ago
> Personal sites still exist in the west, but nobody really seeks them out. The IndieWeb movement, standards like WebMention, services like Neocities, and a growing Fediverse have made it so that there is at least some interest in personal websites in the Anglosphere again. I follow a lot of people in my RSS reader, and there’s a growing community of people regularly writing blog posts, having conversations via their blogs, maintaining digital gardens, and generally building small, niche, non-commercial websites for fun. Not to mention people writing email newsletters. It only appears as if the web today is dominated by corporate interests. It’s true that most people stay within those walled gardens, but there are many people still building things outside of them. A more human web still exists, but you need to specifically go looking for it. I recommend starting with https://ooh.directory https://ooh.directory. If your city has an IndieWebCamp or Homebrew Website Club, you might have good luck there.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I have followed blogs in a few hobbies and interests since the early millennium, and all I see there are bloggers closing up shop left and right, because they claim to be drawing almost no visitors in the walled-garden age. Even when a blog still draws comments, the community who comment may have dwindled to a few obviously autistic or mentally ill people, and their style of commenting probably alienates many who stumble upon the site and might have stuck around. It is only on HN that I see people talk about the indie web outright flourishing. But I suspect what is flourishing is a community of people who came together to identify as an indie-web community. Not people who want to write about a topic (particularly a non-nerd one), get read and commented on by other followers of that topic, but don’t particularly want to be part of a specific indie-web subculture.
gwervc 3y ago
> Anybody who speaks Japanese knows it's really hard to get reliable information on topics searching the Japanese web. Really depends on the topic. If you're searching for "water business", the results are amazing: there's pages explaining at length the difference between each subtype of businesses, shop aggregators and ranking, even people discussing the service providers, etc. I agree that that mentioning sources isn't a priority but that's the exact same thing in the West save for research papers.

082349872349872 3y ago

Just realised I know of two possible western equivalents: 1/ private mailing lists — not subscriber newsletters with breathless copywriting, but the now-seemingly-jurassic technology of "group chat" conducted via SMTP. (they're actually better than group chat IMO, as it's usually possible to receive a daily digest instead of individual messages, and no one minds if one revisits a thread from three weeks or three years ago. [three decades would technically be possible, but I have yet to see it happen myself]) 2/ I know of several individuals who keep separate public and "private" (albeit security via obscurity) web presences: the former for ideas they feel are well enough formed for the general public, and the latter for spitballing, shitposting, rag chewing, etc. with implicit convention that by browsing the private site you are at least acknowledging that none of it is "ready for prime time" or "A-side" material, and possibly acknowledging that the writing is meant to be high, rather than low, context.

rambambram 3y ago

I follow a lot of what I call 'dev blogs' via RSS from a lot of people here on HN. My subscription list is hundreds of websites long by now (probably 350), collected over two years or so. I sometimes try to only visit blogs this way for a day, and it's refreshing. No algorithms, no ads. Usually very good and interesting content, all these people have skin in the game by having a domain name, a website and effort put into crafting an interesting read. There comes a time where I don't want to visit any 'regular' social media like FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc. The open web is already social media. It works for what I want, which is text and images and sometimes a small video.

movedx 3y ago
Nice! Are you willing to share the list somewhere/somehow? Maybe in a Gist?
- rambambram 3y ago
  Definitely. I have this list at heyhomepage.com, at the bottom. Right now, it's a list in HTML, but you can browse it. The accompanying OPML file (basically just a list of RSS feeds) doesn't work at the moment, because it's usually populated one by one when I change something. I made all my subscriptions public at once for your request by changing the database. In the future this OPML file will contain all the feeds, with my categories and all. The HTML list contains 900+ feeds, of which more than onethird is what I call a 'dev blog'. But I also found a lot of interesting sites/feeds on HN that I put in other categories, like 'art n design', 'bizz n marketing', 'philosophy n life, 'science n history', etc. You get the gist (pun intended). The category 'photo feeds' is also interesting. It contains feeds with an image in the <enclosure> tag, which makes for a more lively feed when I browse it in the RSS reader of Hey Homepage (my website system for small businesses and individuals). If you send me a message on the contactform over there, I can reply with an .sql file by mail which contains everything. Might be easier for you to transform it into something workable. Also, very recently this kind of blogroll/webring was done by other people on HN. It contains user-uploaded blogs and feeds from HN users. You might want to search for that. My guess is there is a lot of overlap between my list and theirs. Edit: Right now, the HTML list doesn't contain the categories I added. If you really want that, I can add it quickly within a day or so. Also, there's no personal info in the list (it was private), but if you happen to find something, please let me know. ;)