Show HN: Nekoweb – a retro static web hosting

> By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary

I've never said such thing. It doesn't matter if you can access things directly: proprietary means it's not FOSS, that's it.

> Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest

You need an account to browse Discord, which they can take away from you anytime. If you lose your account you lose your membership to any invite-only communities you belong to, which can be a big deal if you don't have other means to communicate with them to get invited back.

Also, Discord isn't indexable by search engines. So, no there's a big difference between Discord and most web forums.

Also, I don't have anything in particular against Discord (it's miles ahead of Slack in UX for instance, which I hate with a passion), but when people advertise themselves as fans of the old web, and link to their Discord, one can only smirk from the irony.

Ye it what artists and designers talks, the trend cycle.

Ye this guys with yo-yos do not know what is the flex.

I didn't get it either. At first. Then I had a reason to use it.

I am a long time IRC user, and still use that to this day, but in a much less frequent capacity. IRC is a comparative ghost town when thrown up against Discord.

Part of the reason for that is accessibility. Discord does everything IRC does in terms of channels, bots, etc, but packages it in a UI that the masses can easily consume. The addition of voice without having to run Teamspeak or something alongside like we did back in the day. A stable mobile app brings it all together in a portable, easy-to-use package.

I resisted it for awhile, with my younger friends adopting it fairly quickly. Then small businesses and we apps started using it and suddenly half the things I interacted with on a daily basis had their own Discord server. So, I broke rank and tried it

What I found were a few key communities relevant to my interests that were having actual neverending conversations about this I like. Compared to IRC, where response time can be days for any type of question, and that's if someone is in the mood to be friendly instead of crufty. This is the primary reason why I stay in Discord and IRC is just sort of collecting dust in my world. The community either aged out or just became so jaded that they made it inhospitable.

It feels harder every day to not despise the march of technological progress. There are so many eras of computing and internet that I would've loved to see elongated by 10+ years. Then, at least, we would've had more time to get tired of them. Instead, it feels like we're stuck wondering what we lost, in what feels like a very boring and much less fulfilling internet full of SPAM, bots, manipulation, endless pointless culture wars.

Don't get me wrong either, I think computers today are amazing, probably too amazing to be comprehended, but it leaves little to the imagination. You'd think the ubiquitous access to production-quality creativity and development software for free or cheap with commodity computers that are within the reach of many people across the world would be a fantastic outcome that would lead to a Cambrian explosion of creativity. If the era that desktop towers and Flash Player had engendered was great, you'd expect the era after it to be even more wild. Instead though, it's hard to feel that way. Surely the floor and ceiling of production value have raised a bit, but as people in the retro computing and demoscene niches have no doubt taken notice of, limitations breed creativity, and you lose some of that in a world where the capabilities and access have gotten so good. Sure, indie games are in a decent state, but nobody is going to miss the era of Steam Greenlight the way they miss Newgrounds. And if that didn't hurt enough, Internet creativity was at first enriched, then choked out by monetization, as YouTube elevated and then destroyed the prospects of animators on the platform, putting a disgraceful end to the era of Internet animation that proceeded it. Monetization continues to be a rocky road for legitimate creators and a lucrative pay-day for scammers who just steal things and monetize them. The internet, of course, got choked out by corporations and bad actors who realized it was a cheap way to reach a very large amount of people; and now it's not.

I think the surest sign that computers are not exciting anymore is the gradual decline of the software on it. Sure, there's tons of amazing software, but people dread the new updates. How will Firefox tabs get even dumber and uglier? How will Windows become even brazenly more malicious to the user? Which program that I paid for will turn into a subscription product that I can no longer buy new versions of? Software has stagnated, and now a lot of it is pure rent-seeking garbage. What's not is aimlessly redesigning things in an attempt to be "fresh" and "exciting" but people realize that making their browser tabs less legible while taking up more screen space is not fresh or exciting or an improvement of any kind, because end-users are not impressed by your Dribbble, they are trying to use their computer.

No surprise that it's fun to go back and pretend you're on the scrappy Internet that once was, writing dumb web pages in HTML. It feels like something that would've been taken away from us if there was a way for it to be.