One of my first memories is of my dad showing me how Oscar the Grouch was in his Mac trash can, and sang, “I love trash!” when he put something in there. Haven’t thought of that in many years, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this.
I was just playing around with Tiptap last week and build a (very dumb) AI rephrasing app here: https://authored.co. Took a bit to get used to the ProseMirror API, but was a fun experience!
> You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people
This is exactly what I've been after with my side projects. Thanks for the encouragement to continue even when things are slow-going, makes me remember it's a feature not a bug.
The IndieWeb is a nice corner of the web where you can find people with whom to chat about tech, the web, and many other things! https://indieweb.org/discuss
huh I clicked around for a while and I like the vibe but I can't find any directory or feed of pages/projects to explore; it looks like it's all documentation and chat rooms for developers. Is there a way to browse the indie web as a consumer rather than a developer?
Unfortunately, the indie web is very, very dev oriented. That’s because people who care about having personal websites are more often than not developers and they like to talk about development. And as a result of that you get a ton of web related content.
But there’s also something else. As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/
I try to include sites that are “different” and I also try to avoid having too much dev oriented content. But I warn you that you might stumble on some weird content.
> As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/
Out of 6 random tries, all were dev oriented and none were what I would consider weird. 3 out of the 6 were websitehowto.com and the other 3 were developer blogs. Perhaps it was just poor luck, but I don't see how websitehowto.com, a "5-page guide to start a Wordpress website", really fits.
So there’s some 1800 links in there and it’s possible that some might have been expired and then squatted or redirected to some crappy websites.
I just run the experiment and out of 6 clicks I got:
- a site no longer online
- a personal blog on neocities
- another blog on blogspot
- a dev oriented personal site
- another neocities website
- a site dedicated to home networks
Again, unfortunately most indie web is also tech web, there’s no way around it.
I just wish there was some way to have a web site open to the public without having its contents used to train AI models. That threat has basically removed the web as a means for me to share and connect with people over common interests.
It matters a great deal to me because I think that LLMs present an unacceptable societal risk. I want nothing to do with helping to improve them, even a little, because I view that as harming people.
Whether or not it's open source (and whether or not it's OpenAI doing it) doesn't affect the problems I have with it.
Lovely article. As an aside (and I'll say this until I'm blue in the face), it always jars me when a site hijacks default browser scrolling functionality.
This is awesome! I had a similar thought with my own site I got started on at the beginning of Covid: Storylocks [https://storylocks.com]. It has nowhere near the level of intricacy that your site has it seems, but really cool to see other folks experiment in a similar way!