Once upon a time, people didn’t think tech companies were so sleazy. Remember those days, back in the late ’90s?
Oh, you mean back when bubble-crazed investors showered Kozmo.com with a quarter-billion dollars to deliver toothpaste by bike messenger? When Pets.com had a Super Bowl ad?
Okay, so maybe the World Wide Web never really had an age of innocence, at least not since the days of Lynx. But I do remember a little blip of time before the bubble started to inflate when the web felt like a place where anyone who knew the difference between a and a could be a part of this new thing—a thing we were making together.
In some corners of the web, a version of that vibe survives. The “indie web” is a loose concept more or less centered on the idea that the internet should mean flatter, less centralized, more inclusive forms of participation, not new hierarchies. And like many other truly independent endeavors, the indie web isn’t awash in money compared to startups riding the latest wave of venture capital froth.
Unlike the Snapchats and Pinterests of the world, which are valued in the billions despite having only hazy plans for making money, many indie web companies depend on selling actual (well, actual virtual) things to people to stay in business. On Wednesday, five of these outfits with old-school ideas about the internet have come together to offer a good, old-fashioned holiday sale: half off a year’s worth of indie web when you pay for all of them together.
In what they’re post-ironically calling the Good Web Bundle, the five companies—ThinkUp (Facebook and Twitter metrics), The Toast (smart, funny, bloggy), MLKSHK (indie Imgur), Metafilter (you’ve heard of this), and NewsBlur (RSS reader)—are available in all their premium-version glory for $96.
“These are all ‘grown up’ sites. All of us founders are adults, not annoying brogrammers, and most of us have families and kids and stuff, which is reflected in the makeup of the communities themselves,” says Anil Dash, ThinkUp co-founder (and a WIRED contributing editor). “As a result, all of the sites have comments that are actually fun, instead of being full of people being awful to each other.”
None of these sites may have generated quite the buzz that briefly surrounded Ello, the would-be indie Facebook. But they’ve all been around longer, and they don’t seem to take themselves quite so seriously. Such insouciance is in short supply at the moment as hands are once again wringing over the purported death of the web. As far as the indies are concerned, it seems, so long as HTTP still works, the web will still have life left in it.
“The point here is these sites are all about having fun on the internet, in a way that seems almost old-fashioned these days,” Dash says. “I think some people will sort of flash back to that whole Web 1.0 kind of feeling and find that really appealing.”
