#theweb — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #theweb, aggregated by home.social.
-
The very first website is 35 years old today, and you can still visit it at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html!
"On August 6, 1991, the first website was introduced to the world. [It] contained information about the World Wide Web Project. It launched at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, where it was created by British computer scientist @timbl."
Happy birthday, web!
-
Kagi Brings Back Old-School Search, One Human-Made Website at a Time
-
"These places only exist when the people investing their time and energy know that they are appreciated, credited, and supported."
Good reminder to, if you can't support the creators of your favorite websites financially, at least tell them how much you appreciate their time and effort.
https://aftermath.site/ians-shoelace-site-is-still-the-best-destination-for-tying-your-shoes/
-
“Is #Bluesky on #theWeb? Yes, to an extent. I can post the url of an item I wrote on Bluesky, using an HTML link. That is how the web works…
But it doesn’t work the other way. They love it when you send people to their site, but not so much if you want to #sendthemaway—a sensitive concept to Bluesky’s #investors. Why would you do that? This is where web and silos disagree. The web says “let them go” and the silos ask “do we look like idiots?” @davew
https://daveverse.org/2026/06/01/#a9757 -
RE: https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/114426933389090151
The web entered public domain 33 years ago.
"Imagine being able to communicate at-will with 10 million people all over the world. Imagine having direct access to catalogs of hundreds of libraries [...].
This is not a dream. It's internet."
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/30/1172276538/world-wide-web-internet-anniversary
-
Here's @matthiasott on the importance of human curation in the world flooded by AI slop.
"So what becomes valuable, in a world like this? Not more content. We are drowning in content. What becomes valuable is someone you trust, saying: This is worth your time. Here’s why."
https://newsletter.ownyourweb.site/archive/own-your-web-issue-18-curators/
-
You know those back button-hijacking sites? Especially noticing this on mobile.
"Back button hijacking interferes with the browser's functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration."
Nice to see Google do something about this. Even if you don't use their search, this will still deter people from doing this.
A small victory for the web.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijacking
-
"…#theweb is not dominating #mobile the way it does desktop because it hasn't been allowed to compete. From Apple explicitly suppressing competing browsers & breaking critical features OSwide on the regular, to Google's history of discouraging internal teams from writing mobile web apps and denying competing browsers access to critical PWA features, the fix has been in for 15 yrs.
This grounding in #Apple & #Google proprietary #APIs is the root of the #duopolist's power."
https://infrequently.org/2026/04/the-web-is-an-antitrust-wedge/ -
"For seemingly no reason at all, thousands of people were telling stories about themselves, unguarded even against the background toxicity of internet comment sections. Many of them used the word “checkpoint.”"
https://longreads.com/2026/02/26/internet-checkpoint-taia777-donkey-kong/
-
An article from last year that celebrates the 40th anniversary of ".com".
"Four decades ago, the first domain was registered and the initial batch of top-level domains came to be. Nearly a billion domains have been registered since then."
https://www.dotcom.press/history-of-domains
-
"That's my belief. It just takes a bit of guidance and access to understandable knowledge. That word 'understandable,' it's important. You don't introduce people to website building by using geek-speak. You have to talk human to human..."
-
"By the end of 1994, there were roughly 10,000 websites on the web. It was still early days and most of the websites were quite basic in structure."
-
Interesting perspective.
"The rush to vilify and eliminate the comment section ignored, as Ben notes, that a subscription to news outlets doesn’t just have to provide access to journalism, it can feature participation in journalism."
Via https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xtg6uhgsy2j7k2a6qtcood2w/post/3mdxqtevkxc2x
-
"#TheWeb: Everything Is Shifting at Once
What makes this moment disorienting to some, but also exciting, is that multiple systems are changing simultaneously. It’s not just consumption models or discovery mechanisms or economics of the internet. It’s all of them, at the same time, and they’re interconnected.
The #consumption model used to be straightforward. A user goes to a surface, consumes content directly, and synthesizes the information themselves.
Now an AI intermediary does the #synthesis across dozens of surfaces and delivers the answer directly. The user can get what they need (achieve that conversion) without directly visiting the source anymore."
-
"This shift is gradual, not binary. #Directvisits still happen. #Search still sends traffic. But the proportion is changing, and as AI intermediaries become more capable and more widely used, that proportion will continue to shift. #Publishers whose revenue depends on attention are feeling this now, and it will become more pronounced over time.
#Theweb will continue to change into the future; this isn’t a single switch being flipped, but a #migration." -
"In the beginning, the Web was simple. When I first encountered it in early 1993 (working for O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator[...]), there was only one browser for viewing web pages and it ran exclusively on the Unix platform. There were about a dozen tags that made any difference. Designing a web page was a relatively simple task."
-
"Before TikTok, Tumblr or LiveJournal, before widespread computer ownership or the web itself, trans people were connecting online, allowing them to talk to people like themselves.
For many, this was the first time. The earliest forums offered an invaluable space for people whose innate sense of being trans clashed with the prevailing culture. But there, in cyberspace, they built community and friendships."
https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/love-knowledge-frontlines-trans-cyberspace
-
"I'm in the process of setting up a WWW server that will blow the socks off your Mosaic viewer!"
-
Will AI reach its true potential, or just be something for the “big five” to capitalize from?
-
Here’s What It’s Like to Use Acuity Scheduling for Your Business or Side Hustle (2026)
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.wired.com/story/acuity-scheduling/
-
"By 2003, with the blogosphere now established, music fans had begun to gravitate to blogs to pontificate about the music and artists they loved."
-
Why I 🧡 the web.
Wayback Machine Web Browser Extension
https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback-machine-webextension
lets you "go back in time to see how a URL has changed and evolved through the history of the Web."
-
30 years (and one day) ago!
"JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers."
https://web.archive.org/web/20070916144913/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease67.html
-
Happy 25th anniversary to this Daily Mail article from the year 2000, proclaiming that internet "may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it".
-
"It’s notable that MySpace came from an LA-based company, eUniverse. While the Silicon Valley based Friendster tried to impose various technological constraints onto its users, MySpace adopted a more laidback, Venice Beach-like approach. You can do whatever you want with your profile and make friends with whomever you choose — that was the MySpace way."
https://cybercultural.com/p/myspace-2003/
#internet #TheWeb #SocialMedia #history #technology #cyberculture
-
"In June 2002, Pew Research Center released a report on broadband uptake. It stated that 21% of all Internet users in America — 24 million adults — now had broadband in the home, up from just 6% two years ago."
-
"By the end of 2002, blogging had blossomed into a thriving ecosystem of colourful personal sites that interconnected to each other via RSS, trackback and blogrolls."
-
"On 12 November 1990 [Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau] published a formal proposal outlining principal concepts and defining important terms behind the web. The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”."
https://home.cern/science/computing/where-web-was-born
https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html
#WorldWideWeb #HypertextProject #TheWeb #internet #TechHistory #technology #OnThisDay #OTD