19 ms·

What is the small web? (2020)

146 points by acqbu 5y ago

tingletech 5y ago
2020
superkuh 5y ago
I don't think advocating people make their entire website out of javascript, a very "big web" requirement, is smart. It just seems like they're doing so to promote their particular npm based product and cause centralization in it. No. Small web is your own server, yes, but also your own HTML. Small web is when a webpage is a webpage and not an application that is impenetrably dense and non-modular and frankly too complex for most people to edit. Small web is a static site that doesn't have exploits, doesn't require package managers, and lasts forever. Anyone can, and did (back in the 90s) make simple functional websites that had text and images. This site.js is not small web and I really hope he reconsiders pushing this on small web curious noobs who it will hurt.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  Yeah, and there's no cookies, privacy policies, legal terms, and so forth. There's just your web page. Simple and clean.
  - taneq 5y ago
    The privacy policies, legal terms, GDPR clickthroughs etc. all came about because everyone was already getting so evil with the cookies and tracking etc. It’s nice to think they all cl appeared together as symptoms of Big Web but the truth is, the very early web that was built on trust and collaboration only lasted a blink of an eye before the bs starts to creep in.
- pphysch 5y ago
  I laughed out loud when I got to the "...and that's why we're pushing a new javascript framework" bit. JS is the asphalt for the race-to-the-bottom of frontend fashion and maximizing engagements, i.e. "The Big Web". It is not required for small, functional websites, and indeed tends to make them less small and less functional/maintainable.
skeyo 5y ago
I don't see how Site.js is any different than what he describes as "big web". So you create your own website and host it on a server. That's always been possible. What am I missing?
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  I think "Big Web" is a profile hosted on "cloud infrastructure" owned by a company with public stock. Whereas "small web" is a website you build/create yourself and host on your own server?
  - wjziv 5y ago
    This tracks with me until I consider the server/client rapport. As far as I can read into the author's intent, this dynamic does not change when someone hosts their own server. If anything, the "dumb delivery mechanism" only became slightly more trustworthy?
  - skeyo 5y ago
    But what is "your own server"? Yeah I host my personal site on my raspberry pi, but most people aren't going to do that. They're going to host on a server owned by a company with public stock.
    - daveevad 5y ago
      It seems to me like one could market a device that isn't much more than a RPI that would download a container image from small-web-dot-registry that would run a webserver that encapsulates the site one authored on small-web-dot-com. This image could have some smarts to either punch the right holes through the the router's firewall or do something even more clever with a peer-to-peer mesh network. At the end of the day, what one would have is a website of their own that they control within their residence. It would foster a lot of this small web spirit and be very cheap to bring to market and maintain.
      - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
ujetin 5y ago
I share the same ideals as mentioned in this article, but implementation is what matters. The person who wrote this article references mastodon as an example of the small web, but just looking at mastodon, you can see that is not what happens. Mastodon has a couple of very large hosts with thousands or hundreds of thousands of users, exactly the same as the big web that the author describes. This is because people think "well, why go to the trouble of setting all of this stuff up myself, I will just create an account on one of the existing hosts", and then you just have the big web again.
- kevincox 5y ago
  I think there is a huge difference between deciding to sign up on a huge host vs having to use the big host. Mastodon maybe isn't the best example of this as IIUC you will get some visibility to other users on your host by default. But for example email you may choose to use GMail or Outlook because it takes no effort, but there is little downside to choosing another host.
- mastazi 5y ago
  On Mastodon you can choose among dozens of servers, you can decide to change server and still be able to use Mastodon. Now compare that with Youtube or Twitter. You can fix some aspects using browser extensions[1] or clients[2] but by and large, if you don't like something about the platform, the only available choice is leaving. [1] e.g. https://www.undistracted.app/ https://www.undistracted.app/ [2] e.g. https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/
kreek 5y ago
Small Web: <html>Party like it’s 1999</html>
- umeshunni 5y ago
  The author of the article was probably not born then
LAC-Tech 5y ago
The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. This doesn't seem like it's true. I feel like it came from the unix culture. Unless they got it from drug dealers...
- vicda 5y ago
  This is so painfully bullshit. Imagine the scientists and engineers at bell labs thinking that the operators of their machines are akin to drug addicts.
  - yeetaccount4 5y ago
    Well they did start development in the 60’s, it wasn’t all pot and acid back then. Oddly relevant to social media nowadays though.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    The common quip is from the mid 90s, usually attributed to Edward Tufte but apparently the real source is "a guy from Wired": > And o there is this incredible remark which a guy from Wired told me, that there are only two industries which refer to their customers as users, drugs and computers. "I've just got to have release 7.2", right! [0] https://cryptome.org/jya/tufte.htm https://cryptome.org/jya/tufte.htm
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Well the drug dealers were certainly there first, etymonline.com has this to say of "user": Of narcotics, from 1935; of computers, from 1967." I am struggling to find a source for who first called users "users" back in 1967 - Actually I see it being used in the 1965 "Multics" papers [0] and the 1964 article in The Atlantic "Computers of Tomorrow" [1], as if it was already a term-of-art. [0] https://multicians.org/history.html https://multicians.org/history.html [1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~traister/greenbf.html https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~traister/greenbf.html
  - 5y ago
Semiapies 5y ago
"Big Tech’s tools will never dismantle Big Tech’s house." This is a JavaScript library that runs sites on a rented server. Might as well be in the cloud.
desireco42 5y ago
The thing about users was cringy, but otherwise I like this. I am not sure where to put it though, should I power up Raspberry Pi for this and let it run all the time or really use my desktop. Maybe something distributed would be good idea. Then you can use your phone to update it. But then you get into whole crypto thing way too much? I think this is useful thinking and exploration and if we suspend skepticism, it might be fun. I don't like seeing Twitter and FB and Youtube censoring people (and morons) all the time. I believe in the right of morons to publish stupid things.
- lazyjeff 5y ago
  I think the ideals are similar to indie web [https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/], so maybe the author may want to join that community. Basically the indie web feels like a mature community-based approach to what the author is describing, minus the javascript library.
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
    My thoughts exactly. The IndieWeb community has been around for some time. This article has been discussed before, and people familiar with IndieWeb made the same point back then. [0] The author responded [1] but in my opinion it was weak sauce. Also, IndieWeb is a much better label than small web. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24268472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24268472 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269830
freediver 5y ago
> Site.js is now the easiest way to set up and run your own Owncast instance. This will install Owncast, set it up as a systemd service, and serve it securely at your hostname. Unfortunately, 99.99% of people this is meant for, that are currently users of big web, have no idea what the two previous sentences mean.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  That's why they said it's just for devs now. In the furure this should be as easy as installing a Facebook app and signing up for Facebook.
  - mro_name 5y ago
    but hopefully leaving people not as clueless. But to not learn a thing seems to be part of the long-term promise. While short term they have to be devs. I would like that the way round. Start with laypersons to begin with. That may not look high-tech, however. Hard to get tech-funding for such.
austincheney 5y ago
> The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2). Coincidentally the Who is hiring is front page today. In the comments do a CTRL+F and search for TypeScript and see how many posts are directly correlated with a ginormous framework like React, Angular, or Vue.
pkdpic 5y ago
Like many here I want to dig the spirit of this but I am confused about the concrete steps / tools they're describing. It always seemed to me like ultimately the problem with getting free of the big web would be the physical infrastructure side of the equation. The modern web does feel controlled by information age rentiers but growing up in the 90s that always felt like an unavoidable given to me. I was under the impression that the freedom of the web lay in the freedom of information and the subsequent empowerment of individuals to maneuver through and undermine larger systems of power.
quickthrower2 5y ago
For this to appeal to an average person I think youd need some $20 device that works out of the box as a server. Connects to your wifi like your smart tv does, and then does some black magic to get around the NAT issue to register a subdomain that you can use. The device provides a facebook or twitter like UI to set up your site. Even then Im not sure how you'll get people off social media onto this as it is still less convenient unfortunately.
- femto 5y ago
  It currently costs €69. https://freedombox.org/buy/ https://freedombox.org/buy/
vorpalhex 5y ago
What would be the small web equivalent of "greenwashing" (when a company talks up how green a product is as a sales pitch)? It's a bit like rules for being a punk rocker, no?
- gitgrump 5y ago
  I vote for "webwashing".
erulabs 5y ago
While I'm not sure about some of the half-said political attitude in this post, I do strongly believe in what the author is getting at, and am also building a company for "the Small Web". 1 I've been working on an essay for quite awhile now on a similar topic: what does a decentralized web actually look like? If Big Cloud is an empire-sized industry and Blockchain is a wildly re-engineered approach to solving the centralized app problem, then the simple dark-horse is just more folks running server software (at home or just on computers they own). TCP/IP and HTTP as-is decentralize just fine - we have an education and tooling problem, not a technical problem. > The spiders that sit at its centre waiting to suck you dry are Big Tech people farmers like Facebook, Google Look, Big Tech doesn't have to be evil for there to be advantages to running your own software. There are _much more immediate_ benefits to every day people, like owning all the rights to all the pictures of their children, seeing fewer ads when consuming media, or having a way to host a website without paying a fortune 10 company a monthly stipend. Melodrama and angry politics aside, we at least agree that it's time to fix the internet :) 1 https://kubesail.com https://kubesail.com
- anderspitman 5y ago
  Yep. I think that kubesail's RPi + tunneling approach is essentially the way forward today. It's what I'm banking on in my projects as well.
agumonkey 5y ago
It's still big webish in the sense it asssumes most of life is digital. What if I want no server, and websites I want to read is not about people.
chubot 5y ago
I generally agree with this article, but ... Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. I feel like people forgot that shared hosting exists (e.g. Dreamhost, or Nearly Free Speech). One computer can serve tons of websites! It can serve multiple Hacker News spikes at once. And the site doesn't even need to be in a virtual machine or container. This is how "LAMP" / PHP works! But these days it works with Python too. Either way it's perfect for static and JS-only sites. A single computer is often more reliable than a cloud. The cloud has single points of failure that are less reliable than a commodity machine. ---- I mentioned that here: What's the Fastest Way To Get a Page on the Web? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254006 http://www.oilshell.org/share/question.html http://www.oilshell.org/share/question.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#whats-the-fastest-way-to-get-a-page-on-the-web http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#wha... I think the problem is that shared hosting has a shell interface (this used to be a desirable feature!!). And many users no longer know shell. Hopefully we can make it easier to learn!
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The biggest problem with shared hosting is security. It's common for everyone's processes to run as the same "www-data" user. It can be made secure, but it isn't common and most shared hosting is powered by off-the-shelf piles of shit like cPanel which are Swiss cheese when it comes to security.
  - chubot 5y ago
    No I don't believe any shared hosting does this (at least not ones anybody pays money for). Dreamhost and Nearly Free Speech definitely don't. This might have been true 20 years ago, but I doubt it was true 10 years ago, and definitely not today. Maybe some tiny universities had janky setups like this. Fun fact: shared hosting providers maintained OS virtualization for Linux years before Docker existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ -- initial release 2005 I'm not quite sure but it also appears to have pre-dated cgroups. If you pack many users together on a server, you will want something like cgroups to prevent neighbors from DOS-ing each other. This was a fork and wasn't in mainline Linux. So they actually had MORE isolation than running as separate Unix users, not LESS. (edit: I'm not sure exactly which shared hosting providers used such Linux kernel forks, but I'd be interested in anyone with direct knowledge. From using the shell on various shared hosting providers, I know they have pretty custom configurations with more isolation than stock distros.) This page is a little fuzzy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company)
fml11223344 5y ago
Probably the same sentiment as many of the comments already present, but I haven't read all of them. Don't people understand that the original Internet was/is built for exactly this(?); end to end connectivity between any two hosts. This is still mostly possible, but you do now have to get a public/routable ipv4 address. IPv6 gets back to the E2E ideal, without any overlay. P2P systems from 20 years ago also solved this problem. For example hidden services on Tor, i2p, generic DHTs, etc. Why people think we need to redo everything so that it works with JS and Blockchain boggles the mind. It's not corporate vs. individual as the seem to argue, it's just pro Blockchain, or pro Ethereum or something else. This article seems to just be framing this same non-argument in a slightly different way. Get a static, public IP and run your microhttpd blog for pennies. Don't act like hosting it on an overcomplicated overengineed Blockchain network is going to decentalize the web. It's already decentralized, but nobody wants to go to your hidden service...
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > Why people think we need to redo everything so that it works with JS and Blockchain boggles the mind. Is this redoing it? I don' get that impression. It seems ther're just making it easy, as easy as installing an app and signing up for Facebook.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  At uncharitable times I feel like the "small web" is about making a new hype machine around a certain ideology. > P2P systems from 20 years ago also solved this problem. For example hidden services on Tor, i2p, generic DHTs, etc. In addition it's easier than ever to get static IPv4 services or to setup a tiny VPS whose sole purpose is to offer a static IPv4 that routes traffic from/to computers on your LAN. Other than Tor hidden services, there's also tons of other internet software out there old and new for network connected devices to share messages like Email, Usenet, Bitmessage, UUCP, NNCP, Secure Scuttlebutt, IPFS, DAT, nostr, etc, etc.
samwighttt 5y ago
No. No no no no no. This is not the solution to the problems we’re facing. While it’s nice to push people to run their own hardware and software, it does nothing to solve the problem of large corporations having large amounts of control and power with little regulation oversight. We like to do this thing in tech where we try to solve all of our problems with engineering and software. What we’re encountering now is not something that can be solved with software: it’s a political and economic problem. We have large corporations who have the power of small countries with little (if any) oversight on the stuff they build. Apple is attempting to scan users’ photos. Amazon is using software to exploit their workers and treat them like shit, and to stalk their users around the web into buying more shit. Facebook is giving teens eating disorders and trying to create a version of Instagram for children. The problem we’re having now is fundamentally a political problem. We have to work together as a society, collectively instead of individually, to decide what the limits of these corporations should be. That happens through boring political processes and debates that nobody likes, which isn’t appealing to us programmers. But it’s the reality we face. Individualistic ‘solutions’ like this only cause more harm because they don’t address the actual problems at hand. It’s like when Shell introduced the idea of the ‘carbon footprint’ to shift the conversation from us as a society holding corporations accountable to individuals being held accountable. The focus *must* be on political solutions to these problems, because there is no technical way this can be solved.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  But there are technical ways this can be solved. Don't use their services is one. I've got a lot of problems but you know what problems I don't have? Being censored and tracked by facebook and google. It really is very much an individual problem with individual solutions, though some may not like that fact because individual solutions don't accomplish their goals, it is still a fact.
  - brightstep 5y ago
    Please explain to me the path from individuals hosting their own Small Web apps to the mitigation of Amazon's power and prevalence in our lives. It's nice that you are off fb, I am too. But some number of individuals deciding not to use the platform does nothing when it is the way most people access the internet. People don't like this example because of its stereotypical user base, but remember what happened to parlor? That's what FAANG does, and will do, to individual small competitors unless their power is challenged in the political and economic arena.
dexterzt 5y ago
I feel this is basically off-grid living in the cyber space.
smegsicle 5y ago
That art style is really getting out of hand- didn't alphabet corporation just come out with campaign using those?
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Corporate Memphis? Everyone is at it. Easy to draw I guess and quickly create loads of illustrations.
asennoussi 5y ago
Sooooo..... Web 1.0?
bullen 5y ago
For small web to exist all fiber ISPs need to provide fixed external IPs and open ports 25, 53 and 80. Dynamic DNS is a hardcoded rentseeking joke in most routers, they never wanted an open standard for that. I'm making my own DynDNS but then I now need cloud instances, which is a dependency we should not need. Act accordingly in your local jurisdiction.
- anderspitman 5y ago
  Long term you're probably right, but I think tunneling services[0] like Cloudflare tunnel or my own boringproxy are going to be what we use for the next 10 years or so. We're going to have to prove that self-hosting is useful before people start demanding ipv6, public static IPs, and decent upload speeds from their ISPs. [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
  - bullen 5y ago
    Tunneling increases latency. Seen that the final medium/media is a 3D action MMO we don't have time for that latency.
    - mmcgaha 5y ago
      I have a little site that I moved behind cloudflare. The dead simple https is nice but I have a page with a gallery of 140 images and it loads so much slower than before the move. Granted I am not paying anything for the service and I don't plan to change it back so this is just an observation.
      - bullen 5y ago
        HTTPS is a waste of electricity.
        anderspitman 5y ago
        That's a hot take. Do you never do anything on the web which you don't want your ISP to have full access to? That said, I agree HTTPS is too complicated to set up, even with ACME/LetsEncrypt. I wish you could just set up your own certificate with the public key in your DNS records. But that requires DNSSEC/DoH or similar.
teleforce 5y ago
SQLite author is an avid Tcl user and he recently introduced a small, secure and modern CGI based web application called wapp [1],[2]. I think this small web concept proposal is excellent fit for wapp. Coincidently, a few days back there was an HN post on a novel backend-less web application using SQLite for off-line friendly apps [3]. Combination of small web and local-first software will probably a new killer feature of the Internet in the near future [4]. [1] Wapp - A Web-Application Framework for TCL: https://wapp.tcl.tk/home https://wapp.tcl.tk/home [2] EuroTcl2019: Wapp - A framework for web applications in Tcl (Richard Hipp): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgOlizq-Ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgOlizq-Ms [3] Using the SQLite-over-HTTP “hack” to make back end-less, offline-friendly apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758613 [4] Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud: https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf
Lapsa 5y ago
mro_name 5y ago
while operating the server is the full thing, shared hosting is sensibly doable for most if not all people taking part in the internet. It's cumbersome application stacks that make hosting a part time job and scare the hell out of laypeople. Disclaimer: I evangelize single-file static monoliths like https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo
mro_name 5y ago
if it just were without dependency hell but intended for long-term.
chrismorgan 5y ago
The *.small-web.com thing rubs me the wrong way, going entirely against the stated purpose: https://you.small-web.com https://you.small-web.com is only a little better than https://mega.corp/you https://mega.corp/you, because you still don’t own your home. You do probably have more control of what goes there, but you’re still far too liable to be cut off with no recourse. You don’t actually control it. Just wait until people start hosting malware on small-web.com and the domain gets blacklisted, or when some error in curbing abuse takes you down as well, or when people abusing any free service provided becomes too much of a trial for the maintainers and they shut the whole project down. That’s what normally happens to these things, more than with some, though certainly not all, larger things (e.g. I’d depend on github.io not being shut down far more than small-web.com). Step one in the Small Web must be to have your own domain name. Then you can migrate between hosting providers, host it on a Raspberry Pi in your garage if your home ISP allows such things, or whatever. (I’m glossing over the fact that even when it’s https://your.site https://your.site, as they include in one other illustration in the article, with the adjacent caption “on the Small Web, you own your own home”, you don’t own your home, but lease it—though so long as you pick a sensible TLD, keep paying, and don’t do anything particularly illegal in whatever jurisdictions are relevant, you’re very unlikely to lose it.)
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  This. I've been playing around with the same concepts, and owning your own domain is critical. However, doing the domain registration dance is tricky for newbies. And, of course, it costs money. When presented with the choice between a Facebook Page (for free, immediate audience, etc) and a domain + website (costs money, no SEO, etc) it's very hard to persuade anyone that they should do this. Of course, we all understand that there are very good reasons for doing it the hard way, but it is still the hard way. Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful.
  - mlatu 5y ago
    because of this i have been eying the GNS (gnunet.org) project for quite some time. it's a p2p, decentralized, dns-replacement, also gnu I would love to see this adapted widely, but as always, the established standards are good enough and any advantages resulting from using gnunet are not advantageous from a profit oriented point of view, so it would first need a killerapp to take off.
amelius 5y ago
There is no need to "build the small web". The small web already exists. It's the part of the web that already existed before mega corporations took control.
fleddr 5y ago
The problem with "web2", big tech, call it whatever you like, is not where you host things. Whether you host your own website on your personal desktop or in the cloud, it does nothing to break the power of big tech. The issue is discoverability. Your content is to be found in Google search, the main social networks and/or app stores. Or you simply do not exist for the world. The gate keepers are there and do not care how you host things. If we take a very gross average, a typical website may have some 60-70% organic traffic (Google search), 20% from social networks, 5-10% paid traffic depending on your ad budget, and the rest is direct traffic. So 90-95% of your traffic comes from gate keepers. "Small web" does nothing to change or break this. Who cares where your server is? Small web equally doesn't mention anything about monetization, the other big issue for publishers. To sum up, web2 sucks for publishers. You fully rely on gatekeepers for visibility and traffic and it's near impossible to monetize. Mostly because users don't want to pay for anything. To users, web2 is pretty great. They like having a handful of apps as portals to pretty much everything. They aren't going back to RSS readers or "surf" a thousand individual websites.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > The issue is discoverability That's only true if you want "big web" vistor stats. You don't need discoverability for a personal website, because the only people that would be interested would be people that know you - and for them, you just email a link.
Sosh101 5y ago
> The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit This statement makes me not want to read the rest of the article. Pulled out of the air and stated as fact. The term users was around long before big tech.
- newaccount74 5y ago
  I am pretty sure that this sentence is an attempt at deadpan humor.
  - Sosh101 5y ago
    Right, could be
tamebadger 5y ago
Interesting to see no one mentioned https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ yet, to really get to the small web, we would not only need each user to "serve their own site" but also buy in to self hosting other services, google docs, trello etc Getting this right at scale is super difficult for many reasons, but the biggest one I can think of is "ease of use" for the general user, and not building things only developers or "tech savvy" users can use.
- justsignedupnow 5y ago
  Great project, glad they kept it online at least, hope someone will move it further on some day. https://fairapps.net https://fairapps.net are also hosting an instance, I've used it for HackerCMS scratchpads and stuff, not sure how up to date all the apps are though
WA 5y ago
The small web is bigger than ever, although the corporate web is even bigger. The pie just got a lot larger. Just as an example: I'm currently researching gravel bikes, because I want to buy one. I encounter: - Magazines with test reviews - Blog posts - Forums sharing experiences - Bike manufacturers - Online shops for bikes - Some review videos All of them are on https://own.site https://own.site and not exclusively on big corp websites. The only execption are the videos, which are on YouTube. Yes, it'd be nice if a restaurant didn't post their menu on Facebook, but in my experience, they are the minority anyways. I think everyone's own perception and browsing habits play a big role.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
In my opinion "The Small Web" should be "Microsoft Frontpage"ish" paired with one button publishes. Should give the user the option of hosting it with a wide variety of vendors from shared hosting, something like Netlify, and several like GeoCities. or for advanced users self-publish on a computer they have. To make it easy for the common person to post what they want on the web. Involving Javascript, Hugo, an abstraction on Hugo, a database, JavaScript frameworks is just yet another tech stack accessible only to full stack or front-end programmers. (or whoever has the necessary skills. These people should already have all the information and ability to make their own website and host it wherever they want. They do not require help to solve it. I would like to see a user-friendly desktop app Like Frontpage was a long time ago. Let people type lika a Wordprocessor, add colors, images, blinking, tables, visitor count, guest books and so on. some other things, press button, its up. Tomorrow write a bit press button, its up.
- qnsi 5y ago
  hey ThinkBeat, sorry to hijack a comment. You posted a Ask HN: thread [0] Ask HN: Are there any web/text scrapers that work with Facebook Groups? did u found something working? Or did you drop your search. I am interested in scraping private FB groups [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28095801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28095801
  - ThinkBeat 5y ago
    Hey, No, I have not found anything that I would dare to try. There is a (in my opinion) shady set of "scraper providers" who for some $$$ (how much and by what matrix differs a lot). That claim to do this for you. Firstly, I dont really trust them to begin with. Second since this a breach of Facebook TOS going with a known provider seems scary and I would prefer to set my own request repeat speed. More importantly usually their main "top" feature is to scrape out all contact information in a group for "marketing" opportunities. So I decided against all those. I am still looking. I have not given up. My need for this is actually increasing. I tried doing it by hand but I could not stand it. I have tried some Macro recorders of various types but not found one that really understands what I want to do. The structure of Facebooks pages are (on purpose?) hard to explain to such a tool. I keep looking around various scraping frameworks for Go, C# and Python. I have not yet been able to create a program / script that is good enough. It seems so bloody easy when you sit there,with Facebook in a browser you scroll, cut paste, scroll. annoying. To be clear, I want the content of the post I am an admin for. Other admins and some users are worried that many years worth of great discourse can be lost at a blink of a Facebook eye. So I am trying to find a "backup" solution really.
poniko 5y ago
5% of users (People) are creators .. 95% want to mindless scroll Instagram/tiktoc. Not sure why people would want to own their own web (Or understand that they don't own their Instagram) and why that would solve anything.
pdimitar 5y ago
I am definitely getting old because such idealism only ticks me off these days. Make a hardware box that serves as a router, switch AND a home server, sell it at competitive prices, have it preloaded with a hardened Linux containing everything needed (including NAS, VPN, home media organizers and whatnot), make it automatically discover other such nodes (and maybe configure lend-able bandwidth and disk space while you are at it; decentralization!), and then we're talking. Make it 100% transparent, automatic, fault-proof and as speedy as you can so that the regular Joe and Jane can just install it at home because they heard it's a router and a home server in one and it's costing less than other similar solutions. Tell them it can stream from YouTube and 10 other apps. Make the regular people tempted to buy it! Only THEN will the "small web" or any such adjacent sentiments take off. Ain't ever happening before that. Enough with the "raising awareness" stuff, seriously. We on HN / Lobsters and a lot of people on Reddit are quite "aware" already. We get it. But 99% of us have families to feed and seriously can't squeeze the effort unless we're willing to forfeit the precious 5-10% free time a time a day that we get as busy adults. Make something that will bring the regular people on board. Before that you are just a small fly in an airplane hangar trying to buzz and make a difference. Ain't happening, dude. Roll up your sleeves and start inventing the future. If you have the time to craft such an article then you likely have the time to start working on the practical aspect as well.
- arthur_sav 5y ago
  Nothing starts as a mass adoption product.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Absolutely. I am saying that whoever wants to bring a product to the mainstream must also work super hard to make sure they are solving the right problems for the masses. And the way to make it a mass product is to make it friendly for the regular users. I feel that a lot of HN-ers get lost in rabbit holes of uber-complex VPN setups or how do you make a Kubernetes clusters of RPi machines, or how do you 3D-print a case for that etc. Not going to try and dictate what people should work on in their free time, obviously. I am only targeting such preachy articles and organizations. If they have the budget to market some future that they are not inventing yet then maybe they should reallocate some budget to actually inventing it as well.
selfsimilar 5y ago
What is really not addressed is privacy of content. Regardless of where it’s hosted (AWS v Rpi) the leap from fully-public static site to something you can curate eyeballs on is pretty big. If simple auth (`htpwd`) was more universally supported and easier to use that would be great. But I find myself reaching for a CMS when I don’t want randos looking at my family photos on the open web.

146 points by acqbu 5y ago

2020

I don't think advocating people make their entire website out of javascript, a very "big web" requirement, is smart. It just seems like they're doing so to promote their particular npm based product and cause centralization in it. No. Small web is your own server, yes, but also your own HTML. Small web is when a webpage is a webpage and not an application that is impenetrably dense and non-modular and frankly too complex for most people to edit. Small web is a static site that doesn't have exploits, doesn't require package managers, and lasts forever. Anyone can, and did (back in the 90s) make simple functional websites that had text and images. This site.js is not small web and I really hope he reconsiders pushing this on small web curious noobs who it will hurt.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
softwarebeware 5y ago
Yeah, and there's no cookies, privacy policies, legal terms, and so forth. There's just your web page. Simple and clean.
- taneq 5y ago
  The privacy policies, legal terms, GDPR clickthroughs etc. all came about because everyone was already getting so evil with the cookies and tracking etc. It’s nice to think they all cl appeared together as symptoms of Big Web but the truth is, the very early web that was built on trust and collaboration only lasted a blink of an eye before the bs starts to creep in.
pphysch 5y ago
I laughed out loud when I got to the "...and that's why we're pushing a new javascript framework" bit. JS is the asphalt for the race-to-the-bottom of frontend fashion and maximizing engagements, i.e. "The Big Web". It is not required for small, functional websites, and indeed tends to make them less small and less functional/maintainable.

skeyo 5y ago

I don't see how Site.js is any different than what he describes as "big web". So you create your own website and host it on a server. That's always been possible. What am I missing?

softwarebeware 5y ago
I think "Big Web" is a profile hosted on "cloud infrastructure" owned by a company with public stock. Whereas "small web" is a website you build/create yourself and host on your own server?
- wjziv 5y ago
  This tracks with me until I consider the server/client rapport. As far as I can read into the author's intent, this dynamic does not change when someone hosts their own server. If anything, the "dumb delivery mechanism" only became slightly more trustworthy?
- skeyo 5y ago
  But what is "your own server"? Yeah I host my personal site on my raspberry pi, but most people aren't going to do that. They're going to host on a server owned by a company with public stock.
  - daveevad 5y ago
    It seems to me like one could market a device that isn't much more than a RPI that would download a container image from small-web-dot-registry that would run a webserver that encapsulates the site one authored on small-web-dot-com. This image could have some smarts to either punch the right holes through the the router's firewall or do something even more clever with a peer-to-peer mesh network. At the end of the day, what one would have is a website of their own that they control within their residence. It would foster a lot of this small web spirit and be very cheap to bring to market and maintain.
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago

ujetin 5y ago

I share the same ideals as mentioned in this article, but implementation is what matters. The person who wrote this article references mastodon as an example of the small web, but just looking at mastodon, you can see that is not what happens. Mastodon has a couple of very large hosts with thousands or hundreds of thousands of users, exactly the same as the big web that the author describes. This is because people think "well, why go to the trouble of setting all of this stuff up myself, I will just create an account on one of the existing hosts", and then you just have the big web again.

kevincox 5y ago
I think there is a huge difference between deciding to sign up on a huge host vs having to use the big host. Mastodon maybe isn't the best example of this as IIUC you will get some visibility to other users on your host by default. But for example email you may choose to use GMail or Outlook because it takes no effort, but there is little downside to choosing another host.
mastazi 5y ago
On Mastodon you can choose among dozens of servers, you can decide to change server and still be able to use Mastodon. Now compare that with Youtube or Twitter. You can fix some aspects using browser extensions[1] or clients[2] but by and large, if you don't like something about the platform, the only available choice is leaving. [1] e.g. https://www.undistracted.app/ https://www.undistracted.app/ [2] e.g. https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/

kreek 5y ago

Small Web: <html>Party like it’s 1999</html>

umeshunni 5y ago
The author of the article was probably not born then

LAC-Tech 5y ago

The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. This doesn't seem like it's true. I feel like it came from the unix culture. Unless they got it from drug dealers...

vicda 5y ago
This is so painfully bullshit. Imagine the scientists and engineers at bell labs thinking that the operators of their machines are akin to drug addicts.
- yeetaccount4 5y ago
  Well they did start development in the 60’s, it wasn’t all pot and acid back then. Oddly relevant to social media nowadays though.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  The common quip is from the mid 90s, usually attributed to Edward Tufte but apparently the real source is "a guy from Wired": > And o there is this incredible remark which a guy from Wired told me, that there are only two industries which refer to their customers as users, drugs and computers. "I've just got to have release 7.2", right! [0] https://cryptome.org/jya/tufte.htm https://cryptome.org/jya/tufte.htm
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Well the drug dealers were certainly there first, etymonline.com has this to say of "user": Of narcotics, from 1935; of computers, from 1967." I am struggling to find a source for who first called users "users" back in 1967 - Actually I see it being used in the 1965 "Multics" papers [0] and the 1964 article in The Atlantic "Computers of Tomorrow" [1], as if it was already a term-of-art. [0] https://multicians.org/history.html https://multicians.org/history.html [1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~traister/greenbf.html https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~traister/greenbf.html
- 5y ago

Semiapies 5y ago

"Big Tech’s tools will never dismantle Big Tech’s house." This is a JavaScript library that runs sites on a rented server. Might as well be in the cloud.

desireco42 5y ago

The thing about users was cringy, but otherwise I like this. I am not sure where to put it though, should I power up Raspberry Pi for this and let it run all the time or really use my desktop. Maybe something distributed would be good idea. Then you can use your phone to update it. But then you get into whole crypto thing way too much? I think this is useful thinking and exploration and if we suspend skepticism, it might be fun. I don't like seeing Twitter and FB and Youtube censoring people (and morons) all the time. I believe in the right of morons to publish stupid things.

lazyjeff 5y ago
I think the ideals are similar to indie web [https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/], so maybe the author may want to join that community. Basically the indie web feels like a mature community-based approach to what the author is describing, minus the javascript library.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  My thoughts exactly. The IndieWeb community has been around for some time. This article has been discussed before, and people familiar with IndieWeb made the same point back then. [0] The author responded [1] but in my opinion it was weak sauce. Also, IndieWeb is a much better label than small web. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24268472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24268472 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269830

freediver 5y ago

> Site.js is now the easiest way to set up and run your own Owncast instance. This will install Owncast, set it up as a systemd service, and serve it securely at your hostname. Unfortunately, 99.99% of people this is meant for, that are currently users of big web, have no idea what the two previous sentences mean.

guerrilla 5y ago
That's why they said it's just for devs now. In the furure this should be as easy as installing a Facebook app and signing up for Facebook.
- mro_name 5y ago
  but hopefully leaving people not as clueless. But to not learn a thing seems to be part of the long-term promise. While short term they have to be devs. I would like that the way round. Start with laypersons to begin with. That may not look high-tech, however. Hard to get tech-funding for such.

austincheney 5y ago

> The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2). Coincidentally the Who is hiring is front page today. In the comments do a CTRL+F and search for TypeScript and see how many posts are directly correlated with a ginormous framework like React, Angular, or Vue.

pkdpic 5y ago

Like many here I want to dig the spirit of this but I am confused about the concrete steps / tools they're describing. It always seemed to me like ultimately the problem with getting free of the big web would be the physical infrastructure side of the equation. The modern web does feel controlled by information age rentiers but growing up in the 90s that always felt like an unavoidable given to me. I was under the impression that the freedom of the web lay in the freedom of information and the subsequent empowerment of individuals to maneuver through and undermine larger systems of power.

quickthrower2 5y ago

For this to appeal to an average person I think youd need some $20 device that works out of the box as a server. Connects to your wifi like your smart tv does, and then does some black magic to get around the NAT issue to register a subdomain that you can use. The device provides a facebook or twitter like UI to set up your site. Even then Im not sure how you'll get people off social media onto this as it is still less convenient unfortunately.

femto 5y ago
It currently costs €69. https://freedombox.org/buy/ https://freedombox.org/buy/

vorpalhex 5y ago

What would be the small web equivalent of "greenwashing" (when a company talks up how green a product is as a sales pitch)? It's a bit like rules for being a punk rocker, no?

gitgrump 5y ago
I vote for "webwashing".

erulabs 5y ago

While I'm not sure about some of the half-said political attitude in this post, I do strongly believe in what the author is getting at, and am also building a company for "the Small Web". 1 I've been working on an essay for quite awhile now on a similar topic: what does a decentralized web actually look like? If Big Cloud is an empire-sized industry and Blockchain is a wildly re-engineered approach to solving the centralized app problem, then the simple dark-horse is just more folks running server software (at home or just on computers they own). TCP/IP and HTTP as-is decentralize just fine - we have an education and tooling problem, not a technical problem. > The spiders that sit at its centre waiting to suck you dry are Big Tech people farmers like Facebook, Google Look, Big Tech doesn't have to be evil for there to be advantages to running your own software. There are _much more immediate_ benefits to every day people, like owning all the rights to all the pictures of their children, seeing fewer ads when consuming media, or having a way to host a website without paying a fortune 10 company a monthly stipend. Melodrama and angry politics aside, we at least agree that it's time to fix the internet :) 1 https://kubesail.com https://kubesail.com

anderspitman 5y ago
Yep. I think that kubesail's RPi + tunneling approach is essentially the way forward today. It's what I'm banking on in my projects as well.

agumonkey 5y ago

It's still big webish in the sense it asssumes most of life is digital. What if I want no server, and websites I want to read is not about people.

chubot 5y ago

I generally agree with this article, but ... Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. I feel like people forgot that shared hosting exists (e.g. Dreamhost, or Nearly Free Speech). One computer can serve tons of websites! It can serve multiple Hacker News spikes at once. And the site doesn't even need to be in a virtual machine or container. This is how "LAMP" / PHP works! But these days it works with Python too. Either way it's perfect for static and JS-only sites. A single computer is often more reliable than a cloud. The cloud has single points of failure that are less reliable than a commodity machine. ---- I mentioned that here: What's the Fastest Way To Get a Page on the Web? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254006 http://www.oilshell.org/share/question.html http://www.oilshell.org/share/question.html http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#whats-the-fastest-way-to-get-a-page-on-the-web http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#wha... I think the problem is that shared hosting has a shell interface (this used to be a desirable feature!!). And many users no longer know shell. Hopefully we can make it easier to learn!

Nextgrid 5y ago
The biggest problem with shared hosting is security. It's common for everyone's processes to run as the same "www-data" user. It can be made secure, but it isn't common and most shared hosting is powered by off-the-shelf piles of shit like cPanel which are Swiss cheese when it comes to security.
- chubot 5y ago
  No I don't believe any shared hosting does this (at least not ones anybody pays money for). Dreamhost and Nearly Free Speech definitely don't. This might have been true 20 years ago, but I doubt it was true 10 years ago, and definitely not today. Maybe some tiny universities had janky setups like this. Fun fact: shared hosting providers maintained OS virtualization for Linux years before Docker existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ -- initial release 2005 I'm not quite sure but it also appears to have pre-dated cgroups. If you pack many users together on a server, you will want something like cgroups to prevent neighbors from DOS-ing each other. This was a fork and wasn't in mainline Linux. So they actually had MORE isolation than running as separate Unix users, not LESS. (edit: I'm not sure exactly which shared hosting providers used such Linux kernel forks, but I'd be interested in anyone with direct knowledge. From using the shell on various shared hosting providers, I know they have pretty custom configurations with more isolation than stock distros.) This page is a little fuzzy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company)

fml11223344 5y ago

Probably the same sentiment as many of the comments already present, but I haven't read all of them. Don't people understand that the original Internet was/is built for exactly this(?); end to end connectivity between any two hosts. This is still mostly possible, but you do now have to get a public/routable ipv4 address. IPv6 gets back to the E2E ideal, without any overlay. P2P systems from 20 years ago also solved this problem. For example hidden services on Tor, i2p, generic DHTs, etc. Why people think we need to redo everything so that it works with JS and Blockchain boggles the mind. It's not corporate vs. individual as the seem to argue, it's just pro Blockchain, or pro Ethereum or something else. This article seems to just be framing this same non-argument in a slightly different way. Get a static, public IP and run your microhttpd blog for pennies. Don't act like hosting it on an overcomplicated overengineed Blockchain network is going to decentalize the web. It's already decentralized, but nobody wants to go to your hidden service...

guerrilla 5y ago
> Why people think we need to redo everything so that it works with JS and Blockchain boggles the mind. Is this redoing it? I don' get that impression. It seems ther're just making it easy, as easy as installing an app and signing up for Facebook.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
At uncharitable times I feel like the "small web" is about making a new hype machine around a certain ideology. > P2P systems from 20 years ago also solved this problem. For example hidden services on Tor, i2p, generic DHTs, etc. In addition it's easier than ever to get static IPv4 services or to setup a tiny VPS whose sole purpose is to offer a static IPv4 that routes traffic from/to computers on your LAN. Other than Tor hidden services, there's also tons of other internet software out there old and new for network connected devices to share messages like Email, Usenet, Bitmessage, UUCP, NNCP, Secure Scuttlebutt, IPFS, DAT, nostr, etc, etc.

samwighttt 5y ago

No. No no no no no. This is not the solution to the problems we’re facing. While it’s nice to push people to run their own hardware and software, it does nothing to solve the problem of large corporations having large amounts of control and power with little regulation oversight. We like to do this thing in tech where we try to solve all of our problems with engineering and software. What we’re encountering now is not something that can be solved with software: it’s a political and economic problem. We have large corporations who have the power of small countries with little (if any) oversight on the stuff they build. Apple is attempting to scan users’ photos. Amazon is using software to exploit their workers and treat them like shit, and to stalk their users around the web into buying more shit. Facebook is giving teens eating disorders and trying to create a version of Instagram for children. The problem we’re having now is fundamentally a political problem. We have to work together as a society, collectively instead of individually, to decide what the limits of these corporations should be. That happens through boring political processes and debates that nobody likes, which isn’t appealing to us programmers. But it’s the reality we face. Individualistic ‘solutions’ like this only cause more harm because they don’t address the actual problems at hand. It’s like when Shell introduced the idea of the ‘carbon footprint’ to shift the conversation from us as a society holding corporations accountable to individuals being held accountable. The focus *must* be on political solutions to these problems, because there is no technical way this can be solved.

betwixthewires 5y ago
But there are technical ways this can be solved. Don't use their services is one. I've got a lot of problems but you know what problems I don't have? Being censored and tracked by facebook and google. It really is very much an individual problem with individual solutions, though some may not like that fact because individual solutions don't accomplish their goals, it is still a fact.
- brightstep 5y ago
  Please explain to me the path from individuals hosting their own Small Web apps to the mitigation of Amazon's power and prevalence in our lives. It's nice that you are off fb, I am too. But some number of individuals deciding not to use the platform does nothing when it is the way most people access the internet. People don't like this example because of its stereotypical user base, but remember what happened to parlor? That's what FAANG does, and will do, to individual small competitors unless their power is challenged in the political and economic arena.

dexterzt 5y ago

I feel this is basically off-grid living in the cyber space.

smegsicle 5y ago

That art style is really getting out of hand- didn't alphabet corporation just come out with campaign using those?

quickthrower2 5y ago
Corporate Memphis? Everyone is at it. Easy to draw I guess and quickly create loads of illustrations.

asennoussi 5y ago

Sooooo..... Web 1.0?

bullen 5y ago

For small web to exist all fiber ISPs need to provide fixed external IPs and open ports 25, 53 and 80. Dynamic DNS is a hardcoded rentseeking joke in most routers, they never wanted an open standard for that. I'm making my own DynDNS but then I now need cloud instances, which is a dependency we should not need. Act accordingly in your local jurisdiction.

anderspitman 5y ago
Long term you're probably right, but I think tunneling services[0] like Cloudflare tunnel or my own boringproxy are going to be what we use for the next 10 years or so. We're going to have to prove that self-hosting is useful before people start demanding ipv6, public static IPs, and decent upload speeds from their ISPs. [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
- bullen 5y ago
  Tunneling increases latency. Seen that the final medium/media is a 3D action MMO we don't have time for that latency.
  - mmcgaha 5y ago
    I have a little site that I moved behind cloudflare. The dead simple https is nice but I have a page with a gallery of 140 images and it loads so much slower than before the move. Granted I am not paying anything for the service and I don't plan to change it back so this is just an observation.
    - bullen 5y ago
      HTTPS is a waste of electricity.
      - anderspitman 5y ago
        That's a hot take. Do you never do anything on the web which you don't want your ISP to have full access to? That said, I agree HTTPS is too complicated to set up, even with ACME/LetsEncrypt. I wish you could just set up your own certificate with the public key in your DNS records. But that requires DNSSEC/DoH or similar.

teleforce 5y ago

SQLite author is an avid Tcl user and he recently introduced a small, secure and modern CGI based web application called wapp [1],[2]. I think this small web concept proposal is excellent fit for wapp. Coincidently, a few days back there was an HN post on a novel backend-less web application using SQLite for off-line friendly apps [3]. Combination of small web and local-first software will probably a new killer feature of the Internet in the near future [4]. [1] Wapp - A Web-Application Framework for TCL: https://wapp.tcl.tk/home https://wapp.tcl.tk/home [2] EuroTcl2019: Wapp - A framework for web applications in Tcl (Richard Hipp): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgOlizq-Ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgOlizq-Ms [3] Using the SQLite-over-HTTP “hack” to make back end-less, offline-friendly apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758613 [4] Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud: https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf

Lapsa 5y ago

mro_name 5y ago

while operating the server is the full thing, shared hosting is sensibly doable for most if not all people taking part in the internet. It's cumbersome application stacks that make hosting a part time job and scare the hell out of laypeople. Disclaimer: I evangelize single-file static monoliths like https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo

mro_name 5y ago

if it just were without dependency hell but intended for long-term.

chrismorgan 5y ago

The *.small-web.com thing rubs me the wrong way, going entirely against the stated purpose: https://you.small-web.com https://you.small-web.com is only a little better than https://mega.corp/you https://mega.corp/you, because you still don’t own your home. You do probably have more control of what goes there, but you’re still far too liable to be cut off with no recourse. You don’t actually control it. Just wait until people start hosting malware on small-web.com and the domain gets blacklisted, or when some error in curbing abuse takes you down as well, or when people abusing any free service provided becomes too much of a trial for the maintainers and they shut the whole project down. That’s what normally happens to these things, more than with some, though certainly not all, larger things (e.g. I’d depend on github.io not being shut down far more than small-web.com). Step one in the Small Web must be to have your own domain name. Then you can migrate between hosting providers, host it on a Raspberry Pi in your garage if your home ISP allows such things, or whatever. (I’m glossing over the fact that even when it’s https://your.site https://your.site, as they include in one other illustration in the article, with the adjacent caption “on the Small Web, you own your own home”, you don’t own your home, but lease it—though so long as you pick a sensible TLD, keep paying, and don’t do anything particularly illegal in whatever jurisdictions are relevant, you’re very unlikely to lose it.)

marcus_holmes 5y ago
This. I've been playing around with the same concepts, and owning your own domain is critical. However, doing the domain registration dance is tricky for newbies. And, of course, it costs money. When presented with the choice between a Facebook Page (for free, immediate audience, etc) and a domain + website (costs money, no SEO, etc) it's very hard to persuade anyone that they should do this. Of course, we all understand that there are very good reasons for doing it the hard way, but it is still the hard way. Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful.
- mlatu 5y ago
  because of this i have been eying the GNS (gnunet.org) project for quite some time. it's a p2p, decentralized, dns-replacement, also gnu I would love to see this adapted widely, but as always, the established standards are good enough and any advantages resulting from using gnunet are not advantageous from a profit oriented point of view, so it would first need a killerapp to take off.

amelius 5y ago

There is no need to "build the small web". The small web already exists. It's the part of the web that already existed before mega corporations took control.

fleddr 5y ago

The problem with "web2", big tech, call it whatever you like, is not where you host things. Whether you host your own website on your personal desktop or in the cloud, it does nothing to break the power of big tech. The issue is discoverability. Your content is to be found in Google search, the main social networks and/or app stores. Or you simply do not exist for the world. The gate keepers are there and do not care how you host things. If we take a very gross average, a typical website may have some 60-70% organic traffic (Google search), 20% from social networks, 5-10% paid traffic depending on your ad budget, and the rest is direct traffic. So 90-95% of your traffic comes from gate keepers. "Small web" does nothing to change or break this. Who cares where your server is? Small web equally doesn't mention anything about monetization, the other big issue for publishers. To sum up, web2 sucks for publishers. You fully rely on gatekeepers for visibility and traffic and it's near impossible to monetize. Mostly because users don't want to pay for anything. To users, web2 is pretty great. They like having a handful of apps as portals to pretty much everything. They aren't going back to RSS readers or "surf" a thousand individual websites.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> The issue is discoverability That's only true if you want "big web" vistor stats. You don't need discoverability for a personal website, because the only people that would be interested would be people that know you - and for them, you just email a link.

Sosh101 5y ago

> The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit This statement makes me not want to read the rest of the article. Pulled out of the air and stated as fact. The term users was around long before big tech.

newaccount74 5y ago
I am pretty sure that this sentence is an attempt at deadpan humor.
- Sosh101 5y ago
  Right, could be

tamebadger 5y ago

Interesting to see no one mentioned https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ yet, to really get to the small web, we would not only need each user to "serve their own site" but also buy in to self hosting other services, google docs, trello etc Getting this right at scale is super difficult for many reasons, but the biggest one I can think of is "ease of use" for the general user, and not building things only developers or "tech savvy" users can use.

justsignedupnow 5y ago
Great project, glad they kept it online at least, hope someone will move it further on some day. https://fairapps.net https://fairapps.net are also hosting an instance, I've used it for HackerCMS scratchpads and stuff, not sure how up to date all the apps are though

WA 5y ago

The small web is bigger than ever, although the corporate web is even bigger. The pie just got a lot larger. Just as an example: I'm currently researching gravel bikes, because I want to buy one. I encounter: - Magazines with test reviews - Blog posts - Forums sharing experiences - Bike manufacturers - Online shops for bikes - Some review videos All of them are on https://own.site https://own.site and not exclusively on big corp websites. The only execption are the videos, which are on YouTube. Yes, it'd be nice if a restaurant didn't post their menu on Facebook, but in my experience, they are the minority anyways. I think everyone's own perception and browsing habits play a big role.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

In my opinion "The Small Web" should be "Microsoft Frontpage"ish" paired with one button publishes. Should give the user the option of hosting it with a wide variety of vendors from shared hosting, something like Netlify, and several like GeoCities. or for advanced users self-publish on a computer they have. To make it easy for the common person to post what they want on the web. Involving Javascript, Hugo, an abstraction on Hugo, a database, JavaScript frameworks is just yet another tech stack accessible only to full stack or front-end programmers. (or whoever has the necessary skills. These people should already have all the information and ability to make their own website and host it wherever they want. They do not require help to solve it. I would like to see a user-friendly desktop app Like Frontpage was a long time ago. Let people type lika a Wordprocessor, add colors, images, blinking, tables, visitor count, guest books and so on. some other things, press button, its up. Tomorrow write a bit press button, its up.

qnsi 5y ago
hey ThinkBeat, sorry to hijack a comment. You posted a Ask HN: thread [0] Ask HN: Are there any web/text scrapers that work with Facebook Groups? did u found something working? Or did you drop your search. I am interested in scraping private FB groups [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28095801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28095801
- ThinkBeat 5y ago
  Hey, No, I have not found anything that I would dare to try. There is a (in my opinion) shady set of "scraper providers" who for some $$$ (how much and by what matrix differs a lot). That claim to do this for you. Firstly, I dont really trust them to begin with. Second since this a breach of Facebook TOS going with a known provider seems scary and I would prefer to set my own request repeat speed. More importantly usually their main "top" feature is to scrape out all contact information in a group for "marketing" opportunities. So I decided against all those. I am still looking. I have not given up. My need for this is actually increasing. I tried doing it by hand but I could not stand it. I have tried some Macro recorders of various types but not found one that really understands what I want to do. The structure of Facebooks pages are (on purpose?) hard to explain to such a tool. I keep looking around various scraping frameworks for Go, C# and Python. I have not yet been able to create a program / script that is good enough. It seems so bloody easy when you sit there,with Facebook in a browser you scroll, cut paste, scroll. annoying. To be clear, I want the content of the post I am an admin for. Other admins and some users are worried that many years worth of great discourse can be lost at a blink of a Facebook eye. So I am trying to find a "backup" solution really.

poniko 5y ago

5% of users (People) are creators .. 95% want to mindless scroll Instagram/tiktoc. Not sure why people would want to own their own web (Or understand that they don't own their Instagram) and why that would solve anything.

pdimitar 5y ago

I am definitely getting old because such idealism only ticks me off these days. Make a hardware box that serves as a router, switch AND a home server, sell it at competitive prices, have it preloaded with a hardened Linux containing everything needed (including NAS, VPN, home media organizers and whatnot), make it automatically discover other such nodes (and maybe configure lend-able bandwidth and disk space while you are at it; decentralization!), and then we're talking. Make it 100% transparent, automatic, fault-proof and as speedy as you can so that the regular Joe and Jane can just install it at home because they heard it's a router and a home server in one and it's costing less than other similar solutions. Tell them it can stream from YouTube and 10 other apps. Make the regular people tempted to buy it! Only THEN will the "small web" or any such adjacent sentiments take off. Ain't ever happening before that. Enough with the "raising awareness" stuff, seriously. We on HN / Lobsters and a lot of people on Reddit are quite "aware" already. We get it. But 99% of us have families to feed and seriously can't squeeze the effort unless we're willing to forfeit the precious 5-10% free time a time a day that we get as busy adults. Make something that will bring the regular people on board. Before that you are just a small fly in an airplane hangar trying to buzz and make a difference. Ain't happening, dude. Roll up your sleeves and start inventing the future. If you have the time to craft such an article then you likely have the time to start working on the practical aspect as well.

arthur_sav 5y ago
Nothing starts as a mass adoption product.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Absolutely. I am saying that whoever wants to bring a product to the mainstream must also work super hard to make sure they are solving the right problems for the masses. And the way to make it a mass product is to make it friendly for the regular users. I feel that a lot of HN-ers get lost in rabbit holes of uber-complex VPN setups or how do you make a Kubernetes clusters of RPi machines, or how do you 3D-print a case for that etc. Not going to try and dictate what people should work on in their free time, obviously. I am only targeting such preachy articles and organizations. If they have the budget to market some future that they are not inventing yet then maybe they should reallocate some budget to actually inventing it as well.

selfsimilar 5y ago

What is really not addressed is privacy of content. Regardless of where it’s hosted (AWS v Rpi) the leap from fully-public static site to something you can curate eyeballs on is pretty big. If simple auth (`htpwd`) was more universally supported and easier to use that would be great. But I find myself reaching for a CMS when I don’t want randos looking at my family photos on the open web.