cozyweb

»When I share websites I’ve made, people often respond with comments like “I wish the web were like this.” These reactions confuse me: I just made this website, and the web still is very much like this: personal, poetic, expressive. That is, if you know where to look.«

That's the thing with the internet. It is not a singular place: the internet is made up by many internets. Some are connected, and some are not. This makes it hard to talk about the internet because your internet is unlikely to be similar to mine. Even when we visit the same social site, we experience different worlds. Where D sees a subcategory of... See more

Instead of discussing whether the internet is good or bad, I suggest we start by asking: do you want to show me your internet?

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for... See more

I’m glad that I’m not the only one who misses old school human curation. For me, it’s more about wanting a connection moreso than valuing the actual thing being shared. I think this trend is accelerating. With generative AI and the ever-present algorithm that has sucked itself into every facet of our life, a part of the response to it will result i... See more

We need more self-hosted platforms for personal publishing that aren’t Wordpress. And don’t point me to Hugo or Netlify or Eleventy or all those things - all of them are great, but none of them are simple enough. We need web publishing tools that do not require users to open the Terminal at all. And we need lots of them.

We need a whole galaxy of o... See more

What do we need, and what do we only reach for out of habit? What exhausts, and what nourishes?

Social environments on the internet provide a bountiful — and sometimes incongruous — bundle: conversation, riffing, jokes and shitposts, entertainment, learning, distraction, inspiration, meeting interesting people.

It's a beautiful bundle, to be sure! It... See more

Being a cozy futurist is being aware that even when indubitably science & technology are cool, we can't forget about the lives of the users of said technology; the goal is a nice future, not just a technically advanced future.