slow web
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slow web is a movement based on deliberately designed web sites focused on more well user-paced experiences instead of real-time, reactive, or frantic experiences, and has principles similar to and compatible with IndieWeb principles.
The slow web could be compared by analogy to, and was preceded by, the slow food movement. This ties in nicely with the idea of eating what you cook from an IndieWeb perspective.
Articles
Articles and posts about a slow web, both explicitly and implicitly:
- 2010-06-23 Rebecca Blood: The Slow Web (plus: the modern experience of film-watching)
- 2012-06 Jack Cheng: The Slow Web
- 2017: https://twitter.com/rachelandrew/status/900021982053400577
- "I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think." @rachelandrew August 22, 2017
- 2018-03-25
Peter Molnar: The internet that took over the Internet Try to imagine a slow web: slow connection, slow updates, slow everything. Take away social networks - no Twitter, no Facebook. Forget news aggregators: no more Hacker News or Reddit, not even Technorati.
- 2018-07-08 WIRED: In the Age of Despair, Find Comfort on the ‘Slow Web’
Brainstorming
Garden first stream second
One defining aspect of many modern sites is the reverse-chronological timeline stream, typically dominating a homepage if not its only content.
This design focus (prioritizing) of latest rather than perhaps most relevant or curated content implicitly reinforces recency bias, and a sense of speed (how fresh is this content?) as more important than thoughtfulness and thus seems antithetical to a "slow web" design.
Peter Molnar’s post The internet that took over the Internet cited Amy Hoy’s How the Blog Broke the Web which makes similar criticisms.
An alternative approach could be to make curated content the defining aspect of a home page, moving the stream to either a sidebar or section there of, or to a separate page entirely ("updates", "blog", etc.).
In the garden and stream metaphor, this would be equivalent to first focusing on the garden on your home page, and only second (if at all) presenting a stream. Preferring the slow growing & evolving garden over the rapid flow of the stream.
Tantek Çelik: rather than a requiring a return to handcrafted HTML for such "garden" content & design, I feel personal wiki pages are a possible approach: wiki-projects#Brainstorming