You deserve a better Internet

Its hard to find a place to hang out on the internet today. Between microblogging sites run by insane billionaire supervillains, content aggregators boosting American propaganda, and art sites feeding chunks of their users souls to the machine gods, there's not a lot of places I feel safe online anymore.

There are alternatives popping up, but they're either fractured-by-design and buggy as hell, dangerous for minority voices, or run by some alternative insane billionaire supervillain.

None of these alternatives -save for Mastodon- respect your privacy or your data. Most are actively harvesting as much data as possible about you

The Usability crisis

The Web is built on open technology, meant to be consumed as text and accessible to all. But today we are experiencing a usability crisis. Web designers (or the people who pay their salaries) have lost the plot.

Design has been trending towards "the more javascript cruft the better" for a long time but recently sites are actively engineered to be hostile to users with accessibility needs. The average site bombards you with async spinners loading gods-knows-what from dozens (dozens!) of different domains. Blind redditors can no longer moderate their subreddits. Screen readers are useless on Thread's horror-show of a frontend.

Its time to bring the web back to its roots. And that's what Gart.gg is about: Accessibility, community, and trust.

A new (old) way forward

We don't want an internet where you have to be a millionaire to run a social media site. You shouldn't need venture capital or angel investors. You *definitely* shouldn't sell user data. And selling ad space should be an absolute last resort.

We believe social media can be user-friendly, resource lean, self-sufficient, and entirely supported by the userbase.

Our Mission

Above all else Gart.gg is a safe place for the Queer community, BIPOCS, staunch antifascists, and our allies.

We are committed to being a refuge from web3, blockchain, nfts, AI scanning, and generally pushing back against the commodification of every social interaction online.

We are committed to accessibility and, in turn, the dis-enshitification of the internet at large.

We will always respect your privacy and we believe in the right to be forgotten. Your art and data is *your* art and data.

So who's behind this?

Its just me. Hi. I'm Sofie.

I'm a webdev who's been in the industry for a little over a decade. I've spent most of my career in ecommerce or the sort of boutique ERP/CRM space but that's not really important. What *is* important is i've spent a long time doing *gestures broadly at the web* that I have a fairly high level of confidence that I can make this work.

I am also a trans woman trapped in South Florida and the situation is dire. I'm experiencing an extreme levels of hardship and prejudice and this is my offer of mutual aid to the community: Help keep me off the street and I'll make sure we always have a safe space online.

So please, If you've made it this far, DONATE TO MY GOFUNDME or buy me some GROCERIES

Thanks for visiting. GoFundMe doners get early access. Check the DevBlog for updates.

~Sofie ❤️