This website, my interpretation of cyberpunk and thoughts on the "Indie Web" microtrend
Posted on: 2025/09/15 08:18:52PM
As an excuse to put the first post on my blog, I want to talk about this website and "Indie Web" microtrend as I've had some thoughts about it for a while now.
Firstly, Shelvware. Why such a name?
I've come to realization that most of the time, when I tell people about it, they end up searching for this as "shelvare" or "shelware" despite my greatest attempts at enunciating the V and W separately. Why not change it? No idea. It just combines Shelvid and Software.
What was the beginning like?
Total anarchy. A 10 day long battle of the wits. Shelvware started out only as a forum. I did have intent of adding other things to it as I do now, but I only had a forum to speak of for a year straight. No home page. No nothing. You see, I didn't have input sanitization at first, and on top of that there were a lot of exploits. My friends were messing with the site like it was a bank containing millions of dollars, and there I was, an unpaid cybersecurity intern who is the only person left in the room (HRs love to ask stupid fucking questions like this and what I'd do in such case, I'm prepared now). Every time I'd fix an issue, they'd figure out two exploits instead. You can sort of see the battle occurring in the earlier posts, some posts are straight up gone as they literally changed the entire website to be another website, with the forum straight up hidden. It was quite entertaining but also drove me insane. I had no job at the time and this project was my obsession in that moment so you can imagine I spent time battling against the intruders.
The part that everyone gets to see first - the aesthetic.
It's a partial nostalgia of the older websites but also a non-nostalgic aspect of it that anyone could express themselves through their designs. I've always loved the crunchier, more lo-fi representation of the digital world, a cyberspace. To me it always felt cyberpunk in its own way, almost like a grittier version of it but I could never fully articulate why that is. This interpretation is more grounded in reality and puts the “punk” in cyberpunk: Creating digital things with tools that everyone has access to, roughly and in a low quality way but with intent and awareness that the thing that's made is rough. It’s not just the web designs that I’m speaking of, though. It’s something that can be (and is) applied to all forms of media. Maybe one day I'll be able to convey my vision of the cyberpunk that I see more clearly.
I hosted the website, now what? I don’t have a full list of things that I want added here. This simply is a space for ideas that exist and will exist one day, that is all. Why do it when it most likely wont get any traction? For the fun of it mostly. Do I mind if this doesn’t reach more people? Not one bit. I think it’s great to have your own personal space that can be accessed by anyone, away from all the censorship and algorithm force-feeding that goes on with centralized sites and apps. Unlimited customization is a massive plus on top of that, and to me, that is worth something: a glorified social media profile that shows off what you want to show to others in a way that very few platforms can. Hosting is cheap and .net domain was the cheapest (and I happen to like it as well), so I don't mind keeping it up for now.
The “Indie Web” microtrend could be more, but isn’t. I’ve noticed a little activity going on regarding personal websites with motivational statements such as “Lets reclaim the internet!” and “Make internet fun again!”. While this is a sentiment I can agree with, I think there are few issues with how it seems to be handled. I see wiby.me thrown around here n there, a search engine like google. While it really is a great tool for finding some old or simple websites, it still eliminates a lot of the potential fun ones due to the fact that it filters out websites that use JavaScript as its primary gimmick. It mostly shows older websites and while that’s great fun, a lot of things have changed since the bloody 2012s both in the world and with technology that we have access to. There are so many great websites that could be made now. Another thing is that people mostly seem to make something for the sake of participating in this microtrend rather than to make something that’s worth looking at. I’ve seen lots of newer indie sites that just have a few memes thrown on the page with “take back internet!” sentiment thrown on there... and that’s it. I think if we really want to make internet more engaging, we have to express ourselves more, show personal interest(s), rant about something that’s on our minds, make it worth someone’s time, share knowledge, inspire others to seek out more websites like yours, or to create one.
Most important and difficult part is to make these websites easier to find. Google used to be great for this but as many of you probably noticed, it’s absolutely dogshit now. Even if it were to revert back to its better state, people are already far too conditioned to add “reddit” at the end of their searches, as nowadays most of the articles you get are AI generated and the way they manage to stretch out an extremely simple information into a slog that no one reads is truly impressive. Will we get to a point where we can see more fun websites? I don’t know. I’d like to hope that the answer is yes, and best I can do is to take part in this grand scheme. As I said though, even if no one finds it, I’m happy to put stuff on here.