small world small web

~dragfyre

he strolls in off the alley and greets the regulars. ~bartender, he says, i'll just have an iced coffee. he settles in next to the bookshelves as usual, pulling out a notebook and scrawling a few notes.

so i keep reading that July is Small Web Month, which is billed as a way to reduce the time we spend on the corporate web. neat idea.

i guess that's why i've been seeing some more activity in various places on gemini - although the pub has been a little quieter than usual of late. of course, one's mileage may vary. it seems some people are taking this opportunity to get away from the internet entirely and work on personal projects irl. others are staying connected while shifting their focus to the small web / smolnet, including gemini.

some of the discussion of late has touched on how geminispace and the community of gemini users seems, or seemed, to be stagnating or even dying out. there's no shortage of capsules to visit, but where is everyone?

gemini and the smolnet in general definitely got a boost during the quarantine lockdowns that followed the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020. so many people stuck at home, hunkering down, bored and at a loss of what to do. at least if you had a computer, you could use it to escape and connect with others - and perhaps in a different way than you usually do. after all, boredom is the mother of creativity. people looked for new ways to connect with others and find comfort as they suffered together through the same shared ordeal, and they built beautiful spaces around those connections.

while there are still plenty of creative people in search of a project, it's hard to deny that conditions have changed. the rat race is back on with a vengeance, draining rather than feeding people's creativity. and depending where you are in the world, economic injustice, conflict and decreased social cohesion means more people are doing everything they can just to stay alive.

so what does all that mean for Small Web July? well to be honest, under conditions like these, it seems like maintaining connections is what we need most of all, along with fellowship, mutual support and solidarity. if corporate social media is where you get that, then i guess that's your thing. but that space is also more or less one of the main battlegrounds, where very powerful interests are fighting over eyeballs, clicks, wallets, and votes as they cling to the remains of a decaying system that proves itself less and less able with every day to deal with the problems of the human family and its planetary home. so taking a step back from that--and carving out spaces for that real human fellowship and interaction--just seems to make sense. if you can do that offline, good: that may just be the best use of your time. but building something different online seems like it should count, too. so enjoy this space and help it grow, naturally and with sincerity.