One of the things that intrigued me about Tilde Club was the concept of going back. Going back in time, to a simpler web, a simpler Internet. True Nerd. Some of that is probably a reaction to how awful a lot of what weâve created has become.
I bought into the hype. I bought into the 90s. I was in college and dumb and full of optimism and a certain zealotry that I no longer really subscribe to. This Internet thing is world changing. Itâs going to connect us all and bring down governments and make for a more equitable, educated, society. It was going to end all wars.
Instead, we got Reddit. And really good/bad at trolling. And perpetual war. War bloggers. Lol. War bloggers. Everything is disappointing.
But who knows, who knows. Weâre just getting started. We are, as I heard Stewart Butterfield say recently, just a decade to two in to a 100 year transformation. France in 1803.
So Tilde made me nostalgic, and I went looking for the first things I did on the Web. When I was young and dumb and full of optimism and a certain zealotry. But itâs all gone. Itâs not even on the Internet archive. It just vanished, in a way that nothing you publish to the Web does anymore.
Thereâs this whole ephemeral thing going on now. Thatâs been going on. But itâs been applied for the most part to apps. Messages and photos and videos. Wut, wut.
What if you applied that thinking to the Web?
Anyway. I wanted to do something special on Tilde. Because for whatever reason, it feels like it deserves something special. Even if the audience is tiny. (Especially because the audience is tiny). I didnât just want to make another retro Web page. Not that retro Web pages arenât fun. I mean, look at my tables!
But what if you could use Tildeâs old-fashioned Unix sensibility to do something totally new? Or at least, original. Something you couldnât get elsewhere. Something ephemeral that only exists for a few minutes, and then is gone forever. A static page thatâs here and then gone, forever, faster than Google can get to it. That might be special. That might be a fun thing to do this weekend.
