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Why doesn't every country's flag have a little guy's face on it like Argentina

Vanishingly few people on Earth are as close to web archival as I am. How many people are lucky enough to call it their full-time job? And I have a small bit of depressing news: Yes, the web is getting worse.

Websites that used to be open are now requiring registration to just view content and forcing users onto proprietary apps. APIs that once encouraged creative usage of data are tougher to access and offer less access. Restrictions on crawling via robots.txt and heavier-handed tactics such as Cloudflare are making it harder to preserve crucial content. Ads are getting more intrusive and frequent.

Everything is being turned into a fine paste of hallucinated LLM slurry. The web is failing at the thing it used to be best at: Directing you to the information you seek as provided by a human who knows about the topic and has taken care to write about it accurately.

It's made it a huge challenge to archive the web, but it's also, obviously, made it a lot harder to find true community in the way that we used to. It's really tough for a distinctly human website like Cohost to thrive in a content slop world. So much money has flowed into the worst possible version of Tech, and building sustainable community-driven projects is really challenging in that environment.

I mourn the loss of Cohost and the web of the past. I don't think we're ever going to go back to what things were like before the money and reactionary rich guys ruined everything, but I'm hoping that we can continue to hold on to each other, build nice things for ourselves, and ensure they're preserved for the future.

That's very kind of you to say. Sorry for the slow reply; I wasn't quite sure how to answer.

Before I started work on Decker I spent nearly a decade refining and using Octo, a browser-based IDE for the CHIP-8 virtual machine. CHIP-8 has become something of a rite of passage for anyone interested in emulator development, but I thought the minimalism of the platform made writing new software for it an interesting and aesthetically appealing challenge. One of the last things I did with Octo was a ground-up rewrite as a standalone C application, providing the same kind of holistic development experience as Decker.

In terms of being another self-contained all-in-one tool for making things, PuzzleScript deserves a mention; it offers a very neat declarative rule-based language for defining Sokoban-like puzzle games and, like Decker, it can produce standalone HTML exports. For more narrative-oriented experiences, there's Bitsy by our own @ldx. The default appearance for Dialogizer text boxes are a little nod to Bitsy. :)

Another project that I think contains some of the same essence as Decker, if not aesthetic, is tiddlyWiki, which shares Decker's very unusual ability to not only produce single-file HTML "exports" but also retain all the editing features in those copies, and so on in perpetuity. I wish that more software retained its plasticity and user-modifiable nature through its whole life-cycle like this. My earliest exploration of computing orbited around spending countless hours using ResEdit to hack up and customize software on the Macintosh SE I rescued out of a dumpster, and it's a tragedy that modern operating systems and tools offer users so much less agency.