2025-10-29

Over the summer, some friends and I read this essay about local communities by Wendell Berry. We also read his book named Jayber Crow which exemplifies the same values in the life of a character. His observations of a centrifugal force which pulls people into a city and kills any small country town nearby sounds eerily similar to the effect of large social media platforms on the Internet. These large platforms draw you in and entice you to stay. This kills smaller digital spaces, because it is easier to visit one place and see everything you want rather than visit five to ten places all of which may or may not be immediately pleasurable.

I am unfortunately too young to have seen the Internet in its early days. From what I have heard, reading various blogs of lament, the Internet started out similar to the American countryside of Berry’s description1. A connected group of small towns, each of them offering a few of the services you need. Anything not in your town can likely be found by taking one of the roads to the next town over. A hyperlink is the digital space equivalent to a road2. I would call the collection of digital spaces and hyperlinks the geographic digital map. Each road you create from your space to another location provides your viewer an option, to stay where they went or to return to the source of the link. If you send them to a place designed to capture their attention, all you can expect is that one day they won’t choose to come back.

I think our culture is finally realizing the effects of creating hyperlinks to cities, in one way or another. I have read several blog posts which are a call to revive the old Internet, where websites were run by small groups or individuals. Each space had its own culture and its own style, a way of acting which was unique to itself and the people who made up the space. This has seen some level of traction, especially with programmers like myself who desire the freedom to just write HTML. Substack as a platform espouses this value by giving each creator their own blog area on the website, although it still has an algorithmic feed so it loses points for that. In any case, the question I’m asking is: How do we stop people from moving to the cities, and revive the older Internet?

One of Berry’s central ideas in the essay is that to have local community, you must have local economy. On the Internet, the economy consists of both regular old currency and more importantly the currency of attention. In some sense, even though I put no ads on my blog and thereby have no monetary gain from it, I am participating in the economy by holding the attention of you, the reader. You’re welcome. Hopefully I shouldn’t have to prove the attention economy too much, our culture has been buzzing with the idea3. In order to recapture the local communities of people on the internet, we must do our best to keep the economy local.

The issue with local economy on the Internet becomes finding the local communities as a traveler. This is quite analogous to visiting a new country for the first time. Say I want find a small town in England. I don’t have much knowledge of England, so I’ll go find a map. This is what Google gives for a quick search of “England map”.

Observing this map, I can clearly see the large cities, but it won’t help me find a smaller town. Using Google for searching the Internet map creates a similar feeling. A generic search query usually only turns up the cities of the Internet. Refining my search query to around a specific area, say, around Leeds, I’ll quickly find some of the smaller towns. Unfortunately, search engines don’t quite mimic the real-life map. Speaking from personal experience, a refined query leads to a whole bunch of SEO-optimized websites and AI overviews trying to grab my attention still. I have a few thoughts about how the Internet map can be made more useful, especially around these smaller communities.

As a maintainer of a digital space, I want to focus on keeping viewers on a smaller network of sites which aren’t designed to optimize the attention economy, including but not limited to my own. One of the best strategies I’ve seen for this is a webring. A webring links a whole bunch of similarly minded sites together forming a community. Unfortunately, I’m not yet cool enough to be in one4. If each website represents a person, or maybe even a business, a webring would represent a town. A town would be just a bunch of shops who have agreed to be near each other for convenience, without any governing power other than the community around them (and perhaps a sheriff, if the community deems it necessary). This seems to me the easiest way forward to create roads between smaller websites and blogs, and gather them into the equivalent of a local map. Keeping the economy of attention inside the webring builds the community.

As a viewer, my hope to run from the city and invest in small communities. My personal strategy for this is to use a RSS reader to keep tabs on my favorite blogs, where I have to intentionally go out of my way to subscribe to someone if I want to hear from them. Furthermore, I send a message through their platform if I have questions. I also might subscribe to a webring, if I want to hear from all sorts of creators in a topic area. Other strategies I’ve tried are blocking algorithmic feeds and sometimes even removing the ability to access the city-size websites entirely.

All of that written, I’m still learning and working on it myself! I want to continue considering better strategies to steward my digital spaces, especially including this blog. If this article made you think of anything else that could be done to structure online spaces to foster the feeling of local community, my inbox is open. Also, definitely check out the essay linked at the beginning of the article if you’re interested in further understanding the idea. Berry writes with a clearer voice than I know how to.