Justin Pinkney

The Other Web

The other web #

watercolour illustration of houses connected by wires

The recently accelerated enshitification of Twitter made me realise that too much of what I do and make is trapped in that platform. I feel this especially when I start trying to explain projects or experiments I've worked on to people by sharing tweets, why isn't it on my blog?

Its probably not an understatement to say that Twitter has changed the course of my career, it's how Toonify went viral and me getting jobs at Lambda and Midjourney both started with Twitter DMs.

But with recent changes to Twitter making me think a bit more about why and what I'm sharing on the web I increasingly realise the internet doesn't just have to be big platforms, social networks, and the first page of a Google search. There is another web out there.

The other web #

I don't know what the right term for it is, but I've heard various ones:

  • the slow/personal/handmade/outer/small/indie web
  • digital homesteading/gardening (well maybe "digital gardens" has been taken by the person productivity/tools for thought crowd)

There's a lot I like about the ethos of tending a little personal place on the web and filling it with things that interest you. Hopefully a few people stumble across it and have that same great feeling of discovery that I do when I come across a lovely home made website full of curiosities and personality.

So I'm trying to share more of what I do here rather than Twitter, and preserve things that were only throw away threads as blog posts (starting here), and make my website my home on the web.

We need links, more links, to good things not the usual garbage listicles, click bait and ad vehicles. The authentic, real, handmade web is hard to find unless we all link to it. So here's some of the interesting places/articles I found delving into and around this topic: