WE USED TO BUILD PLACES
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ESSAY / OPINION

A good old website felt geographically impossible and spatially obvious at the same time. You entered through a homepage, wandered into a projects page, found a link to a friend's server, opened a photo archive, discovered a page about radio towers, then somehow ended up reading a document last edited in 1998.

That was not efficient. It was memorable.

Today the dominant interfaces are efficient at moving media past your eyes. The thing sacrificed is a sense that you went somewhere. A platform post has an author, but the surrounding architecture belongs to the platform. On an independent site the author can shape the surrounding space too.

The Web is at its best when the URL feels like an address rather than merely an identifier.