I was reading a blog post by @misuba when I found a name for something I feel strongly about but never had a word for.
I remember the very first website I ever created. I was around 6 or 7 and my dad sat me down in front of his laptop and walked me through the basics of HTML. He did most of the coding as I picked out the colors and told him what I wanted my "About" page to say. I remember him showing me how to use invisible nested tables as formatting.
Whenever I majored in computer science, I never really thought about web development as a part of myself: I just liked coding in general. It was a complete accident that my first job out of college was in web development. I started thinking about the early web as I got put through the thresher of learning Angular and reactive state management.
Somewhere along the way, I was doing research into UI and aesthetics in general, and I found my way to Devine Lu Linvega's twitter which led me to their website which led me to their webring. To this day, I don't understand half of the things I find in that webring. I was awestruck by these people living in an older internet, rebuilding things from the ground up. I knew there had to be more of these people out there, but I had no way to describe the movement or the philosophy until recently.
I've been thinking about these places a lot as the bird site crumbles. I've been thinking about the opportunities it affords us, even as I am deeply aware of how it's hurting people who rely on discoverability to make a living. Personally, I'm taking this chance to embrace a healthier web paradigm.