A history of the web
From the personal web to the AI-mediated web
Three decades in one scroll — how the open, hand-built web became centralized and rented, and how the next one can be human again. Scroll to travel through time.
The web goes public
Tim Berners-Lee puts the first website online and gives the World Wide Web away for free — no license, no owner, no gatekeeper.
GeoCities & the homepage era
Free hosting lets anyone build a personal “homepage.” Pages are organized into themed neighborhoods — the web as a place people live, not a feed they scroll.
Webrings connect the frontier
Independent sites link together with prev / next / random navigation. Discovery is human and curiosity-driven — you travel the web instead of being fed it.
Hand-coded, weird, and personal
Neon text, tiled backgrounds, guestbooks, hit counters, “under construction” GIFs, and 88×31 pixel buttons. Loud, imperfect, and unmistakably made by a person.
Blogging rises
Blogger, Movable Type, and WordPress make publishing easy while you still own the site. Anyone can have a voice on their own domain.
Forums thrive
phpBB and vBulletin communities become deep, searchable archives of human knowledge — the kind that later vanish when they move to closed chat apps.
RSS: following without a feed
RSS lets you subscribe directly to sites and read them in your own reader — no algorithm deciding what reaches you. The original, open “follow.”
MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter
Social platforms make publishing effortless — and in exchange, identity shifts from websites you own to profiles you rent.
GeoCities is deleted
Yahoo shuts down GeoCities, erasing millions of personal pages. Volunteers scramble to archive what they can. The lesson: when culture lives on a platform, it dies with it.
Feeds replace timelines
Instagram and others move from chronological to algorithmic feeds. A black box now decides what you see — and what your work reaches.
Organic reach collapses
Facebook Page reach is throttled toward zero. The audience you built becomes something you have to pay to reach. Creators start optimizing for the algorithm instead of for people.
Google Reader shuts down
The most popular RSS reader is killed, nudging millions away from open subscriptions and toward closed, algorithmic feeds.
Subscriptions & streaming everywhere
Movies, music, games, and software become rented access. Titles disappear from libraries; editions change silently; nothing is truly yours.
The Reddit API shutdown
Sudden API pricing kills third-party apps like Apollo and a whole ecosystem of tools — a reminder that everything built on a platform is built on rented land.
Closed communities & link rot
Searchable forums give way to Discord servers no search engine can see. Domains expire, fan sites vanish, and the web quietly forgets.
Assistants answer; sites go unvisited
AI assistants summarize the web and hand back answers directly. Fewer people click through to the sites the knowledge came from — and centralization deepens.
Not just disappearing — unvisited
The danger isn’t only that websites disappear. It’s that people stop visiting websites at all — and the incentive to make them quietly dies.
The next web can be human again
Personal websites. RSS and directories. Self-hosting and open protocols. Physical media. Community-run spaces. Webrings. The tools to rebuild a web that feels like ours already exist — they just need people to use them.
You’re part of the next chapter
The story isn’t finished. Every independent page makes the web a little more human.