28 Aug 2025

don't let Web nostalgia obscure a positive Web future

personal sites never left, they just changed. a lot of what we see now are commercialised billboards, selling people’s identities as proxies for intangible ideas. but the old school personal sites are still with us if you know where to look.

the issue is that people wish it was still the mid-to-late 90s and i don’t think that’s a good thing to want. there are a lot of interesting things you can do with the Web now that you couldn’t do back then and it doesn’t have to involve React, Tailwind, generative AI, Substack, or any other evangelising framework. there were also socioeconomical problems in the 90s too (if you’re Gen Z or younger, look them up. it was really bad for a lot of people.)

what we should be doing is taking inspiration from what made those times happier and forge a better future with what we have now. living in the present, carving out our own little spaces on the Web, making them accessible to everyone, not using tables for layouts (seriously, try grid and flexbox).

a lot of things suck right now but longing for days that also sucked but not for you because you were younger isn’t the way. communities without intellectual gatekeeping that go beyond just “groups of people with the same interests” will take us so far.

related: web fonts aren’t the devil