The History of the Web

There is something special about the central metaphor in Naz Hamid’s recent post, Your Site is a Home, as succinct and persuasive an argument for owning your own space as you are ever likely to find.

You can still have a home. A place to hang up your jacket, or park your shoes. A place where you can breathe out. A place where you can hear yourself think critically. A place you might share with loved ones who you can give to, and receive from.

Hamid reframes the personal website as a cozy and comfortable home, wholly your own, set apart from the chaos of cyberspace. And that is a powerful feeling on a web that is often hostile to self-indulgences or creative expression.

This idea of a home was once much more common. It is difficult to trace the exact moment the phrase home page started circulating, but it was in regular use by the web’s earliest pioneers.

The first home pages were varied, sometimes experimental, and frequently personal. Justin Hall, Carolyn Burke, Rajit Bhatnagar and many, many others, erected their home pages wherever they could—finding a bit of room on a university’s web server or via a spare computer stuffed in a closet. What they decided to post was chaotic and unique, and sometimes hard to follow, but it did add up to an incredible reflection of their personalities.

And somewhere along the line, home pages collapsed to simply homepages.

The homepage was central to the web in its first decade or two. Early attempts at community would offer up ways for their members to create their own homepages. ChickClick, one of the first with this kind of service, gave members a homepage they were encouraged to personalize and make their own, surrounded by a familiar and like-minded community.

Geocities took that metaphor and ran as far as they could. When you created a site on Geocities, you had to pick a literal neighborhood you wanted to move in to. They referred to their customers as “homesteaders,” and building a site felt somewhat like erecting a home in a quasi physical space. A digital space that could be as unique as you wanted it to be.

In the 2000’s, in the days of Web 2.0, the phrase homepage fell away, relegated to a rough approximation of a site’s main page. Homepages were replaced by profile pages on centralized platform, plugged into a vast network of friends and online followers, but starkly homogeneous and laced into the latticework of increasingly gigantic online platforms. Matt Webb recently wrote about this transition.

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

On these new platforms you were borrowing somebody else’s space in a walled garden. Meant to keep you in, yes, but also to keep you from seeing what else is out there. Now that our landlords have grown hostile, most people can’t even see out far enough to have a home to return to.

Again, Matt Webb:

Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

Not everybody knows how to build their own home from scratch using a combination of evolving technologies, CMSes and a pathwork of code. Most people can’t, actually.

Not a lot of people can erect homes in the real world either. But they can be pretty damn handy given the chance. They can put up shelves, or arrange their furniture, or build an extension off the side.

Same goes for websites. People know how to build on top of websites using hacks and basic HTML and a bit of creativity. Given a solid structure to begin with, people can make online homes their own. Think about the ingenuity on display using HTML and some clever tricks on the Geocities and Myspace of old.

I’m sad that we lost the homepage metaphor. It was once used as a way to explain the web to people who were first figuring out what global connectivity even felt like. That’s because homes are built within communities, and communities have rules for we all get along.

It shouldn’t feel like harkening back to a bygone era to build a website. It should feel fresh and new and ready made for the next era of a more fragmented and decentralized web that desperately needs it. Our online homes need infrastructure. And homes need neighborhoods that people feel like they can belong to. In Geocities, you “lived” among your fellow site owners. There was a feeling of community and camaraderie, even a version of a neighborhood watch.

There are upstarts of course, and we are lucky to have them. Sites like 32-bit cafe, omg.lol, Neocities, and others I surely haven’t even come across.

But I think we need one-click tools that lean into the idea of a home. A place where you can pull in your data across services and services. Where you can find all of the little pieces of yourself on the vast web and collect them together in a place that’s unique and entirely your own. Where you can post to your blog, read other blogs, build fanpages, or tiny apps, or any of the hundreds of things one can do on the web. A place to hang your hat that makes you feel welcome and comfortable. That is safe, and protected.

I want to help build that. I have found myself nodding vigorously over and over again to all of the incredible ideas about how we can own what’s ours, rewild the internet, and decentralize control away from consolidated platforms. I know people are working on it. Where are we heading to build this new web together?

If anybody needs a hand with that, let me know.