News & Updates

March 24, 2024

The March 2024 Code Jam, our third in the community, is concluding at midnight tonight! This code jam is to commemorate the one-year anniversary of this community's website. It's been a whirlwind of a year, but we feel like this is when we truly began to take shape as more than a Discord server. The experiences we've had with all of our members has helped and continues to help us learn, grow, and build in a multitude of ways.

Baristas have put in a lot of amazing community work over the past year. So grateful for them and for you. We've launched projects, held regular events, and continue to encourage and inspire one another to express themselves and use a website to get out of the walled gardens of the corporate web that has overshadowed this side of the web: the independent web, the more human web, the personal web.

Can't wait to see all the submissions for the code jam, which centered around "what has creating a website done for you?"

You can always follow up-to-date event information on our Discourse forum.

February 15, 2024

Our Discourse forum is live! We are so excited to expand our horizons from just Discord into a longer-form and longer-lasting medium. Our goal is to be around for a long time, and moving to both a forum and having a Discord server is the best way for us to do that. There is also a new Discourse 101 guide to help navigate the new platform for those who might not be used to this type of software.

If you haven't wanted to take the leap and join our Discord, consider joining us over at our forum! Hope to see you there!

February 2, 2024

So happy to announce that Loren has organized our first Valentine's Day event! The 32-Bit Valentine Cafe will be running from February 5th to February 12th, and even if you don't quite know how to code yet, you can participate. Check out the submission guidelines for more information. We're so excited to show some love!

January 11, 2024

The 2023 Holiday Event has wrapped up, and you can see all of the submissions on the display page. Thank you to everyone who participated! We had a huge turnout of blog posts, page submissions, and pixel art. Even the background was a submission!

Big thank you to our Event Planners! This took a lot of brainstorming and coordinating!

January 6, 2024

Happy New Year! We're kicking off 2024 with a 32-Bit Cafe Recipe Book, a cookbook made up of recipes from members of the Cafe. A big thank you to Jay, who ran the project! If you make any of the recipes, be sure to share it with us and let us know how it went.

Our 2023 Holiday Event will be finishing up in a few days, so be sure to get your submissions in before January 10th!

December 15, 2023

The end of 2023 is near, and we're kicking off our 2023 Holiday Event, which celebrates our favorite end-of-year holidays and the New Year!

There's a ton of ways to participate, including a Secret Santa, so check out the event page. The submission deadline is January 10th!

Our Event Planners worked really hard on this one. Thank you so much to them!

November 8, 2023

As the year begins to conclude, we're gearing up for some exciting events around the Cafe. Our Discord anniversary event is in full swing there, but stay tuned for our website's anniversary event in March!

Our year-end event is just around the corner, and we're all super excited about what our Event Planners are up to. We'll give more details about that event in December.

If you're not into Discord much, join us over on our Discuss forum, where we're sharing links and resources with each other and the personal web at large.

Keep building up the independent web! We're counting on you!

October 1, 2023

The month may have just started, but I hope you're all ready for Halloween! Our Event Planners project team have planned a Halloween event that starts on October 11 and runs through October 25. Even if you aren't confident in your web-building skills, there's a ton of ways to get involved and participate.

Thank you so much to our Event Planners for their hard work on this!

August 12, 2023

Our first community jam was a total success! Check out the entries of our amazing community members.

We hope you'll join us on August 20th for our next code jam that runs through August 26th!

July 10, 2023

New event alert! Inspired by Sunday Sites, we are kicking off a monthly event: our first Community Code Jam starts July 16 that will run until July 22. The theme is That Special Thing Close to My Heart, where you create a webpage for your fleeting interests during that 7-day timeframe. It could be about your favorite book, movie, or any of your favorite things; maybe something you enjoyed growing up or a hobby you had during the global pandemic. Whatever it's about, as long as you make a webpage dedicated to that topic during this week, send it in!

On July 22, you'll be able to submit your webpage. Start thinking about ideas! If you want coding buddies, join us in the Discord for live coding sessions together throughout the week.

Thank you so much to our Event Planners for their hard work on this! So excited to see what everyone does!

June 28, 2023

We have started work on a massive Resources List, so feel free to share far and wide! The list is a simple, compiled reference for anyone looking for help and guidance for building websites on the personal web or utilities to help pull back from the corporate web. The best part is it's completely managed by and added to from our community! Check out the 32-Bit Cafe's Resources List for the Personal Web.

June 16, 2023

Super excited about our new Postmill instance, Discuss! If you're looking for a Reddit fix, or didn't want to join our Discord server, join us over there to participate in discussions. New forums are being added via community suggestions. Hope to see you there!

June 5, 2023

Thank you to everyone who submitted an entry for the Pride 2023 Zine! We have a zine reader you can use to go through the entries here. Happy Pride!

May 26, 2023

Only a few days left to submit a submission for our Pride 2023 zine, which is our mid-year event this year! Send in your submissions by 11:59 p.m. PT on May 31st for inclusion in the table of contents on the Pride 2023 event page.

April 7, 2023

it's great to see so many new faces here these past couple of days! this community is really starting to take shape, and i think now might be a good time to go over our goals and what we have planned for the near future.

so, if you're just joining us, welcome! we're an indieweb space for adults who want to get away from the corporate-centric modern internet and embrace the creative, people-oriented, community spirit of the old web. this discord server is where we started, but we hope to build something great together.

What do we have right now?
  • we have the discord!
  • we have this website! it contains some tutorials and resources to help you build your own place on the web, among other things.
  • we offer free email accounts, [you]@32bit.cafe. there's no major usage restrictions, just don't spam or otherwise abuse the service. contact kaylee if you're interested for now, otherwise we will have an intake form soon!
  • we also sometimes have events, to celebrate and show off our members' creativity! see our spring event for the latest one.
Where are we headed?

this is the exciting part. we have a lot of improvements planned for the next couple of weeks; in no particular order:

  • the website will have some new themes and a bit more polish
  • more useful content on the site!
  • we're working on a pubnix / tilde server! everyone will soon have access to a linux shell account, with web and gemini hosting as well as other fun stuff.
  • we'll soon have a webring for our members to join!
  • we hope to host a gitlab (or similar) instance for software projects
  • your email account will soon feature protonmail style encryption! note that you will have to reset your password to activate it when this change is brought in
  • and much more!
How can I help?

32-bit cafe is a community project, and everyone is welcome to help build it! you can contribute in many different ways, but here are just a few:

  • you can spread the word, on other servers, forums, or your own site by linking back to us!
  • anyone can make their own theme for our website! you can upload a custom CSS stylesheet which will be publicly available in the theme selector! this process is a bit janky and requires manual oversight right now, but soon there will be a way to edit and preview your code before submitting it - just like on myspace :D
  • art of any kind is incredible! buttons, banners, posters, whatever you want to make. (please no AI generated material - as cool as the technology is, it kinda goes against the spirit of a human-centric community)
  • we need more content for the site! if you have resources you want to share, knowledge you want to impart, or anything else you think might be useful let us know!
  • if you're a techy person and you want to help with the infrastructure side of things, let us know and you can join the technomancy group!
  • last but definitely not least, if you have any other ideas for what we could be doing as a community, please let us know!! suggestions are more than welcomed, they're encouraged :) we're having amazingly productive conversations in our discord about what to do next.

cheers and stay tuned!

April 1, 2023

We're happy to announce our new 32-Bitcoin Cafe NFT project! Learn more at the 32-Bitcoin Cafe site and start collecting your CryptoCuppaz today. edit: April Fools!

March 21, 2023

The final day to submit for the Spring 2023 event! The gallery of sites will be displayed tomorrow with all the submissions. Thank you to everyone who participated, and we look forward to the next community event!

March 10, 2023

We are now live, thanks to Kaylee! We are also open for theme submissions to showcase your CSS skills. Feel free to submit a stylesheet to help the 32-Bit Cafe look its best! And don't forget to join our Spring 2023 event, which ends on March 21st, and open to all.

This site is under construction, so please send any glaring errors to efac.tib23[tа]ardnax or efac.tib23[tа]eelyak.