Vision

Why make this?

I wanted to make selfweb.club (as well as the open source Mycelium software that powers it) because I felt like there weren't enough tools that enable regular, everyday people to establish a presence on the web without learning a bunch of fancy tools. As fun as it is for folks like me to tinker away on HTML, CSS, Markdown files, Javascript, and static site generators, it's simply unrealistic to expect non-technical folks to learn all of that. That's why we see most people simply establishing their presence online with social media, and maybe making a linktree or similar to link to their various projects.

The idea behind Mycelium is to create an online ecosystem that allows regular people an easy-access option for hosting their online presence, and which would grant a level of freedom a bit more significant than if they were to call Instagram or Twitter their "online home".

While I may be hosting selfweb.club as one possible place that users can come to host their sites, I of course actively welcome any other server admins to clone the project and make their own service as well! I'm just one person, and I'll only be able to accomodate a finite number of users. If more folks want to pitch in to grab even more interested users, I'd be more than happy to see that happen!

Why the web is better

For those who aren't sold on why the web should be treated as being any better than social media sites, I'd like to explain a bit.

We're all quite aware of the way that social media is owned by an increasingly small handful of incredibly wealthy individuals. As part of this dynamic, the very design of those platforms is not made with the best interests of the users in mind. You probably already know what I'm talking about -- deceptive algorithms, dark patterns, incentivising toxic behavior, and just general enshittification across the board.

Human curation vs machine curation

The fact of the matter is that the majority of what you do or see on social media was curated, guided, or perhaps even totally dictated by "the algorithm" -- which is to say that the things you saw were not hand picked by people like you, it was decided on by a computer program whose job was to show you the "next interesting thing" by looking at aggregate data of what everybody else has seen and clicked like on.

The web is different. Have you ever gone spelunking down Wikipedia, starting on one page and just following link after link until you're learning about something completely unrelated? That was how the entire web was supposed to work, but now because of the centralization of information onto big social media apps (who often downrank posts that include outlinks, since it reduces user retention when somebody clicks a link to a different website), this web surfing experience is mostly only a thing on Wikipedia, and maybe a small handful of other wikis.

The walled garden

The other reason the web is better than social media is that its not owned by anybody! Remember when people still used to have to explain that "nobody owns the internet" to their less technical family members? Well, I'm here to tell you that somebody does own Instagram. Somebody does own Twitter. If the owners of Twitter don't like what you have to say, they can not only block your account, but they stop you from ever creating a new one.

On the web, somebody might be able to kick you off of their web-hosting service (although, this is less common), but nobody can stop you from signing up at a new place and hosting your content there. Thus, the thing that keeps moderation in check on the web is what people decide to link to, since there is no algorithm randomly pushing around toxic posts.

None of this is to say necessarily that the web should replace social media entirely (I'm a big fan of comment sections, user interaction, and other features that don't really exist on the web), but I do think society should try to rely less on it by creating more open spaces, like personal websites.