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People still want small, personal corners of the web

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Peter Gombos
58 days ago · Life · hide · 2 comments

I shared some thoughts earlier about building Moments. In simple terms, it’s like Bear Blog, but focused on photos. I expected a handful of people to get it. More did than I thought. Some signed up. Some posted old photos. Some wrote just to say the feeling made sense. Not because it’s refined. It’s not. But because the idea connected: a calm space for photos. No metrics, no audience-building, no pressure. Most responses weren’t about adding features. People just got the premise: a photo can exist on its own. A small record of something that happened. It feels like many people are worn out from constantly presenting themselves. Something that kept coming up: people take photos quietly. Not as “photographers,” just as part of everyday life. While walking, traveling, or noticing something interesting. Those images usually stay tucked away in a camera roll. Kept, but not really seen. That’s the gap I keep returning to. Not a showcase. Not a stream. Just a simple place to revisit. It’s…

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  • John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social 57 days ago

    I agree generally, but....

    A professor friend once had a number of helpful and informative web pages, on literary subjects, on web space provided by his university. Then at some time around 2005 his institution began a shift to courseware for providing information, a locked-in platform that students had to log into.

    I don't think I've ever spoken with a professor who liked those things, but beyond that, it was about the time that universities started steering away from providing faculty webspace.

    I'm not entirely sure about the timeline, or even the exact cause, but the result was that tons of great academic resources from the pre-2010 internet are now dead links. Universities seem to have abandoned the promise and openness of the Web.

    My point is, all of these small web sites are great to have, but it'd also be good if there were some provision made for keeping them alive long term, else in 20 years we'll be back where we started, again.

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