we live in hell

are you hankering for more old-fashioned websites? fringe stuff? weird writers? stuff you won't find on big social media sites?

good news! here are some links to lead you to a different corner of the internet, where people are staking out their own spaces, well away from the big platforms.

i assume if you're here you have at least some interest in that.

so, enjoy:

• https://geminiquickst.art/
  
• https://www.wrecka.ge/
  
• https://fujocoded.com/
  
• https://marginalia-search.com/
  
• https://ooh.directory/
  
• https://thefabulousneckbeard.neocities.org/
  
• https://tilde.club/
  

some of these are personal sites, some are protocols, some are directories/search engines. i may categorize it later, just wanted to keep 'em here for now.

2025 and zombo.com is still going strong:
https://zombo.com

Love the idea of stuff like Gemini and the idea of being able to post old school style content online, but Gemini at least has a high barrier to entry. Got any suggestions for some low barrier ways to post textfiles, writings, blogs, images? Obviously we can post on the forum here, but sometimes it's nice to write a little article with decent formatting and an address you can link to.

"low barrier" is probably like, dropbox. if you want it to be browsable, i don't know... sounds like something i could set up!

neocities is an option if you want something geocities-ish.

but unless you are hosting it yourself you are always at the mercy of Big Corporation in terms of it staying online.

I was thinking about that, being at the mercy of big corporate.

It's an interesting point that early websites were far more portable than they are today. Some of them were all in one affairs with a ton of content on one page with anchor links. You could just save the HTML and it didn't break. Want to mirror it or change hosting? No biggie.

it occurs to me that the various I2P protocols support decentralized hosting, but then you're limiting yourself to an audience of like 0.0001% of the online population. you're also effectively on the "dark web," with skeletons and such.

everything was more portable when websites were just static pages and images.

oddly enough, a lot of modern web design is going back to that, and you can make a page even *more* portable now than you could then, because you can base64-encode images directly into a page now. (i say "now" but i think that capability has been around 10+ years at this point? lol.)

I kinda just remembered bonequest/jerkcity: https://www.bonequest.com/

I can't believe they've been doing this for 25 years.

I can't believe I have known about them for 25 years.

I'm old.

Remember not pr0n? It still exists!

http://www.deathball.net/notpron/

Holy cow. I haven't thought about notpr0n in forever. What a blast from the past.