The revived No JS Club celebrates websites that don't use Javascript, the powerful but sometimes overused code that's been bloating the web and crashing tabs since 1995. The No CSS Club goes a step further and forbids even a scrap of styling beyond the browser defaults. And there is even the No HTML Club, where you're not even allowed to use HTML. Plain text websites!
The modern web is the pure incarnation of evil. When Satan has a 1v1 with his manager, he confers with the modern web. If Satan is Sauron, then the modern web is Melkor [1]. Every horror that you can imagine is because of the modern web. Modern web is not an existential risk (X-risk), but is an astronomic suffering risk (S-risk) [2]. It is the duty of each and every man, woman, and child to revolt against it. If you're not working on returning civilization to ooga-booga, you're a bad person.
A compromise with the clubs is called for. A hypertext brutalism that uses the raw materials of the web to functional, honest ends while allowing web technologies to support clarity, legibility and accessibility. Compare this notion to the web brutalism of recent times, which started off in similar vein but soon became a self-subverting aesthetic: sites using 2.4MB frameworks to add text-shadow: 40px 40px 0px hotpink to 400kb Helvetica webfonts that were already on your computer.
I also like the idea of implementing "hypotext" as an inversion of hypertext. This would somehow avoid the failure modes of extending the structure of text by failing in other ways that are more fun. But I'm in two minds about whether that would be just a toy (e.g. references banished to metadata, i.e. footnotes are the hypertext) or something more conceptual that uses references to collapse the structure of text rather than extend it (e.g. links are includes and going near them spaghettifies your brain). The term is already in use in a structuralist sense, which is to say there are 2 million words of French I have to read first if I want to get away with any of this.
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I do wonder if we're going to see some websites popping up that kind of hit the reset button on social media and go back to smaller communities of folks with something in common.
I kind of miss the days of actually having online conversations with folks you know are real people (not bots), that aren't trying to be an influencer, or get famous, or some how many money off your interactions.
Check out the gemini protocol: https://geminiprotocol.net/
It kinda fills that niche of the "old web".
The main downside is that you need a specific browser, or an extension for your average browser, to load gemini sites.
And they purposely hobbled certain things people want, like inline links and images. Some clients will do it anyway, but it's against the collective wishes of the developers.
If I wanted to track people on Gemini, I could totally do it. It'd just be in a more server-to-server way than how its evolved on HTTP (pixel trackers and such).