Remembering Jess Search and the early noughties web
With ShootingPeople – the groundbreaking email community Jess Search co-founded with Cath LeCouteur – closing after 27 years, I’m revisiting a piece I wrote after Jess's death in 2023 which looked back not only at her impact, but that happy era online after the dotcom crash and before smart phones – when the VCs had left. The decisions Jess and Cath made over two decades ago seem more relevant than ever, as the web looks again towards small and human-run communities across the fediverse, grappling with questions of moderation and sustainability, while trying to chart a different course to the web monopolies. This post-crash and pre-2.0 era that Shooting People exploded in, wasn’t so much about a business model, it was a period of post-web/pre-tech-dystopia, open, queer-punk peer-to-peer culture.https://25.netribution.co.uk/nic/remembering-jess-search-and-post-crash-pre-web2-scene/
