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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

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.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  > Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful. I pondered this before first posting, and decided that although I’m sympathetic to the reasoning I believe it’s a grave error of judgement, and that they should force people to use their own domains. Not only does it undermine their stated goals, but it makes them as a company or foundation more likely to fail since providing a domain will lead to significant abuse of their service if they offer any free service at all, including trial periods. (Newcomers to these sorts of industries tend to be surprised at how all-pervasive and varied abuse is, even of small players.) Requiring that people provide a domain would certainly turn away some potential customers/users that would perhaps have finished the job and moved to a domain of their own later, but it would also vastly reduce the burden of abuse. And so I decided to use the word “must”, italicised, for practical reasons as well as ideological. In their first phase, they’re even targeting tech-savvy people, who are less likely to “need” *.small-web.com.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Exactly. Centralization. Single point of failure. Absurd.

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.
chrismorgan 5y ago
> Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful. I pondered this before first posting, and decided that although I’m sympathetic to the reasoning I believe it’s a grave error of judgement, and that they should force people to use their own domains. Not only does it undermine their stated goals, but it makes them as a company or foundation more likely to fail since providing a domain will lead to significant abuse of their service if they offer any free service at all, including trial periods. (Newcomers to these sorts of industries tend to be surprised at how all-pervasive and varied abuse is, even of small players.) Requiring that people provide a domain would certainly turn away some potential customers/users that would perhaps have finished the job and moved to a domain of their own later, but it would also vastly reduce the burden of abuse. And so I decided to use the word “must”, italicised, for practical reasons as well as ideological. In their first phase, they’re even targeting tech-savvy people, who are less likely to “need” *.small-web.com.

hammyhavoc 5y ago

Exactly. Centralization. Single point of failure. Absurd.