Guys, There's So Much More To The Internet!
Part one of a series where I interview indie web folk about the web revival, unrotting your brain, and their top places to hang out online.
We seem to have reached a boiling point of online fatigue. Swiping between the same apps every hour or so, hoping for something new. Settling, instead, for whatever’s there. Letting it affect us or placate us or help us zone out for the duration of the smoke break, bathroom break, bedtime routine.
But luckily there’s so much more to the online experience. And some of us are catching on.
The indie web has been a point of fascination for me over the past couple of years, especially since I became an editor at Untested. It’s an autonomous space reminiscent of the early days of the internet in all its messy, personalised glory. It’s organic, branching out like a mycelium network.
Bold colours, cartoonish fonts, intimate journal entries, animated GIFs. Sites vary wildly from personal pages to interactive adventures to shrines aka fan pages dedicated to a beloved figure (like this Axl Rose fan page and this one about Prometheus).
I love the indie web for its visual style—check out this noir comic-book of a home page, this point-and-click SciFi novella, and this rollercoaster ride of colours. But I also love that it invites creativity, diversity, and genuine connection to blossom away from the pressures of the mainstream web: monetise, perform a mood or persona, sell your personal brand.
And, even better, I think the indie web is enjoying a bit of a revival. Not going mainstream exactly, because then it wouldn’t be indie anymore. But the tides seem to be shifting (back) towards a more intentional and curated internet experience.
If you want a detailed intro to the indie web, plus lots of links to get started, check out this article I wrote for New_Public. I really enjoyed working on it and it gave me the opportunity to interview a dozen small web netizens and pick their brains. I got so many thought-provoking responses and was thoroughly bummed out when I couldn’t fit them all into the piece.
So, I want to give them their own space here, published as a mini-series. I hope this can be a good companion series to my previous articles about curiosity and keeping a daily photo diary, and more broadly to the trend I’ve seen popping up on Substack and elsewhere, of young people trying to unrot their brain.
Welcome to Melonking.net
Melonking is one of the best examples of an indie website I’ve come across. A project spanning countless pages and with a rich visual style, it’s partly biographical, partly fiction, idealist, wildly creative. It’s the site that its owner, Daniel Murray, wanted to make when he was six. In his own words, “a recollection of the web through the infinity mirror of time”. Closed on Mondays, of course, in honour of all the lost things in the world.
I spoke to Daniel about how Melonking came to be, the web revival, what it means to him, and his top recommendations for exploring the indie web. Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
How would you introduce the small, indie & personal web to someone who has never been there? What does it mean for you?
The web revival is like a rave, it’s not a place you go to, it's a thing you become. Someone can bring you to the party, but you're only really there once you start to participate. At its best, it's the block party of the web. It’s not here to solve any problems or make money. The web revival is about the joy of uselessness, the power of fun, and believing in the web, as a medium of art, and a space made for humanity.
For me [it means] freedom. It's a chance to be free from politics, identity, expectations and all the baggage of mainstream life. With that freedom comes the chance to build spaces that are genuine to me and that I'm excited to work on. It's the same freedom a painter feels when they are lost in their craft, but for me the whole web is a painting.
How and why did you create Melonking?
Melonking.net is a website I started in 2016, and my goal was to do everything wrong. I wanted to code it badly and I wanted it to be crammed with low quality images. I wanted it to be unexplained and inaccessible because the world desperately wants to explain and define everything, and you must not let it!
Art and love are at home in flaws and mystery, and I wanted my website to feel like home to me. I wanted it to be full of the things I loved, and I wanted the things I loved to have a true home on the web. As for the how: it’s coded in plain HTML, you don't need much knowledge to start and you don't need to pay anyone to use it.
In your opinion, is there a web revival going on in the 2020s? Why / why not?
I use the term "web revival" to mean "the revival of website making as folk art". It's a riff on the 20th century American folk music revival, and it implies that early personal sites, like those hosted on GeoCities, were culturally significant as digital folk art.
Since 2010 there has been a slow but major shift towards accepting ephemeral web media not just as goofy nostalgia, but as something genuinely important to the story of the web and the collective culture shared by everyone who experiences the internet. That shift is happening at all levels of society, from teens (who are usually ahead of the curve when it comes to culture) to big art galleries and businesses. It's part of the web maturing and learning to accept itself.
People often mistake the web revival as being about returning to an imaginary lost golden age of the web, but it’s not, it's about reviving the optimism and playfulness that should always be present in the web.
Are you on social media? Why / why not?
I'm on a self-hosted mastodon but that's it! I joined Twitter very early, around 2006 and I loved it back then, but I deleted it in 2014 when the culture seemed to have turned rotten. I love the web, and I love exploring new things on the web, but social media has been stale for years. It's not exciting to me and it doesn't offer any new opportunities, so I don't see a lot of point in using it.
Top 3 places/creators/resources you'd recommend to someone just getting to know this part of the internet.
Here is a short trip across some web revival spaces (the trick to any good web surf is to click links!)
1. As a first stop: This site is simultaneously coded by hundreds of people, it’s very cool and broken and silly (click the Sitemap link). You will find numerous outlinks to people’s sites, projects, and pages. (Hosted as part of the Melon web-o-verse.)
2. Loren's site is lovely. This site is consistently planned and almost the perfect example of a personal site at its best, with all sorts of links and notes and resources.
3. Last I suggest a visit to moonkitty. This one is probably my favourite site on Neocities. It has a super refreshing design, it’s moody, mysterious, and pushes you to explore.
* As an added mention - all of my projects and sites can be found via https://melonland.net, along with our community wiki, forum, and guides!
Thanks, Daniel, for agreeing to answer my questions!
If you want to explore more of the indie web, I think the links shared here will be a good starting point.
I hope that, by publishing this interview series, I can give you all some insight into other ways to be on the internet—the communities and spaces that might be hard to reach, but very rewarding once you get there.
I really miss this phase of the internet because looking back, there was just a lot of creativity in the way that people made those websites. I remember playing a lot with HTML/CSS and just seeing what's possible. It's wonderful that you're making this interview series and I'm glad I stumbled across this piece because I wouldn't even know where to start looking.