i was talking about the cohost shutdown to a friend of mine who is in her 40s and when i mentioned neocities, she had never heard of it, but she told me about her geocities website she made when she was in college that had pictures of her cats and links to her favorite Xena fanfics and various things. she said that she saw it had been archived on the wayback machine a few years ago and wondered if it was still there. so while i am driving us somewhere she looks it up on wayback on her phone and starts cackling and telling me that she CANNOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES show me this website, bc its too embarrassing lmao.
anyways, maybe next week i will actually look at some of the posts I've saved with instructions for setting up personal blogs and rss feeds. to be clear, my friend is not particularly a computer-toucher. this used to just be how people used the web. not everyone, obviously, but the glamour and mystification of "building a website" had not set in yet. if you wanted a place to post, you had to learn how to make one, but that was seen as normal, not this insurmountable mountain of hidden knowledge you had to decrypt.
i feel like it's like many kids these days not knowing how to navigate a file directory bc nothing in their computer use requires them to learn anything, bc everything is apps and frictionless. it's not necessarily bad for things to be made more accessible to people who don't have time or capacity to learn a new skill, but i think the ubiquity of this easy-to-use-ness makes those skills feel more difficult than they used to feel. because you could at any moment simply choose to avoid learning them and instead use one of a number of hell-websites scientifically calibrated to melt your brain and your self-esteem and also sell you Pepsi. the path of least resistance being right there makes the path of some resistance seem way way harder. and i don't think that's just a perception, i think it does make it actually harder in a way you can't just talk yourself out of.
so maybe we embrace that. it's gonna be hard. there's gonna be friction. yr gonna wish, at times, you could just give a CEO your social security number and plug in to an existing platform and not have to do the work. and we will just have to keep choosing the harder path, or choose to unplug and go outside, bc cohost has taught us the importance of having agency over your space, your technology, and everything you create therein. and we can't unknow what we now know: that a better web is possible.
