I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?

Teenagers these days grow up with a phone instead of MSDOS or a C64 and how will they ever learn to tinker? How can we transition from play to programming, allowing people to create their own games, like in the old days you could play on a MUD or MUSH (I liked MUSHes better!) and from text adventure to community to programming it had everything. And I want the same thing for the web and messaging. People writing bots. People writing CGI scripts or whatever. I want it all! I want it now!

@kensanata there’s some fun stuff out there like the pico-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

Separately: I think with phones, it’s hard because the hardware is all closed, integrated, proprietary. I remember part of the reason my friends and I used to tinker when we were kids was because we were pretty poor but trying to assemble the coolest machine we could from the parts we could scrounge. I imagine it would be a different world if you could build a phone out of components the way you can build a pc.