The 32-Bit Cafe, first and foremost, is a community as a resource. We're a loose collective of website developers, artists, website designers, writers, technologists, university students, and internet enthusiasts at varying levels of expertise. We believe that building your own website is important, and this is a hobby that needs to be fostered within a non-judgmental space. Talking to folks interested in the same hobby as you is super fun and building stuff with them is even more fun, so we like to do both.
The best part about the 32-Bit Cafe is that we're trying to move the internet forward productively in the ways we can make an impact, participating in the creation of web services, websites, and weird, wacky web projects. We want to bring back the idea of personal websites to the many of us who have been stuck in social media cycles since the emergence of Web 2.0. Not to mention, we're not just helping people build their first websites; we're also making our own hosted services for anyone to use and participate in to help with decentralizing hosted services.
Need an RSS reader, for instance? We've got you covered with a FreshRSS reader. And more services are being added all the time, thanks to community members!
We do believe in the small internet, the small web, the slow web, the personal web, the anti-corporate web: whatever you want to call it, it's grassroots and it's been steadily growing since even before the global pandemic in 2020. We want to stop depending on corporations for everything when it comes to our web services, and we want to help promote building more infrastructure to the internet as a whole. We want more people to build websites for fun, not just to make money. Everyone benefits from an open, free internet, and that includes more self-expression that isn't on social media platforms.
Our goals are along the same lines of other communities that are parallel to our values and technology-centric: the Indieweb, the Web Revival, the beginning of the Yesterweb, and Tildeverse communities like tilde.team. We are not creating anything brand new; we're simply contributing to the decentralization of these concepts of communities within a smaller, more intimate space so community-building is earnest and competent. We are one of many, and happy to be part of this side of the 'net bringing folks into the fold of building the personal web.