I was very sorry to see the death of the Yesterweb forum a few weeks ago. (Technically, it was consigned to read-only status.) I feel that it was a very beneficial tool for raising awareness of the fact that we as individuals can help to mold the Internet into a better place to spend our online time. Specifically, the death of the forum means fewer people on the Internet talking about building and hosting their own websites. Someone suggested a few weeks ago that Blue Dwarf (https://bluedwarf.top) fill the hole left behind. Although I do not want Blue Dwarf to become simply a drop-in replacement for yesterweb, I strongly feel that discussing the small web is one of many valuable contributions that can be made by the more technically-oriented, small independent forums like Blue Dwarf. This should follow naturally anyway, given the high percentage of our users who are actively engaged in web projects of their own. For these reasons, I am pleased to point out the addition of two new Blue Dwarf categories with the latest Cackle software alpha update. “Self-hosting” and “small web/personal websites” have been added.

Unfortunately, these topics will take months to be populated with a significant number of new posts. Old posts do not show up automatically in newly-created categories, and I do not have time to do that by hand. I would appreciate if those of you who happen to stumble across good articles in these two categories in the near future would post links to them here on Blue Dwarf, and I will do the same. Thank you in advance.

Blue Dwarf also supports many of the classic browsers from the 1990’s like Netscape and very old versions of Opera. Since all of the computation is done on the server (no JavaScript required) and Blue Dwarf is essentially a text-only social network, it runs easily on very old computers. In this way at least, Blue Dwarf users should be able experience a relatively authentic recreation of an early Web 2.0 forum experience.