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Rediscovering the Small Web (2020)
- nils-m-holm 2y agoHere's my contribution to the small web: http://t3x.org http://t3x.org
- sylware 2y agoCareful, if you show noscript/basic (x)html does a good enough job, you will get attacked by big tech shadow-paid hackers (or idiotic ones), that to force you to use their javascripted grotesquely massive and complex web-engines. ...
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI also dislike the skinner box that is today's web, but do you really think it's somebody's job to attack you for having your site be a document?
- sylware 2y agoWell, maybe not a static document, but as soon as you have some basic HTML forms doing a good enough job, I would not be surprised to it gets attacked by big tech shadow-paid hackers (or idiotic ones) to push forward their massive and complex javascripted web engines which they have control over. Look at whom the crime is a benefit in the end.
- NackerHughes 2y agoWhat? This can easily be averted by adding a captcha to the form (server-side validation so no JS needed) and/or some sort of rate limiter or firewall, e.g. blocking any IP address that sends too many requests too quickly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- felixyz 2y agoWow, I remember discovering your page in the late 90s. Never thought I'd find it again!
- nils-m-holm 2y agoBeing found is the greatest problem that small web sites have these days. Glad you found it again! :)
- pkphilip 2y agoThis is such an useful set of links! thank you!
- nils-m-holm 2y agoPretty much everything that is linked to is also on T3X.ORG. :)
- swayvil 2y agoHey man I'm into meditation too. Nice to meet you.
- roschdal 2y agoThe web was so much more fun in the 90s.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoFun parts of the web still exist today, they're just struggling to be noticed. Arguably the biggest change since then is in signal to noise ratio.
- nicbou 2y agoAnd the algorithms we live by. Google does not easily surface those websites. Social networks suppress posts with links.
- BaculumMeumEst 2y agoThe problem is that most of the interesting content I'm interested is posted in the not-so-fun parts of the web, so I feel forced to participate.
- CalRobert 2y agoA lot of the good stuff got sucked in to walled gardens. People’s personal home pages or tacky MySpace pages were definitely more fun than the current semiprofessional content scroll. Forums like this very one were mostly subsumed in to Reddit. Nevermind the death of the bbs (not actually the internet I realise)
- 5350-uiop-1130 2y agomobile devices, app-ification and the social media that really started to kill the small web, kind of ironically. and if you're a front end developer it was apple launching the meta viewport tag in 2007 killed the simple front end.
- 082349872349872 2y ago"Today is September 11323, 1993"
- 5350-uiop-1130 2y agoyep. truly eternal.
- thehappyfellow 2y agoOne of the best internet experiences I had in a while is reading (and writing!) posts on bearblog.dev, check out their discover feed. Wholesome place. In similar spirit, check out https://ooh.directory https://ooh.directory
- marginalia_nu 2y agoIf I'm excused for self-promoting, I've also made some tools for discovery: e.g. https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/site/t3x.org?view=info https://search.marginalia.nu/site/t3x.org?view=info
- 8organicbits 2y agoHere's another self-promotion. https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ This uses OPML blogrolls to crawl blog-to-blog recommendations. I seeded it with the blogs I follow and various planets (https://indieweb.org/planet https://indieweb.org/planet) and then recursively followed recommendations to build an organic network. Lots of the content is tech-related, indieweb, and smallweb. It's grown to 17 languages and over 4000 RSS/atom feeds. As an example, the linked blog has a page here [1] and it was discovered by a recommendation by [2]. [1] https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/feed-12ac5c19b1de9ffa432f0063f84539c4/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/feed-12ac5... [2] https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/feed-8ecf912379244d536a74e8070a923b6e/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/feed-8ecf9...
- freediver 2y agoThis is cool! Is the aggregate list supposed to update regularly? https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/rss.xml https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/rss.xml
- 8organicbits 2y agoYes, semi-regularly, I did a fresh update since your message. To reduce storage size, only the title/link/metadata of latest post from each feed is saved. I run the crawler manually, aiming for weekly, but sometimes less frequently. So this won't catch every post and it lags behind quite a bit. I'm hitting some hosting sites faster than I'd like, especially ones that support custom domain names, so I'm planning on fixing up the rate-limiting strategy before I put it in a daily cron job. There's a plan for ArchiveTeam to use the RSS feed as another way of discovering blog posts to archive. I don't think it's generally useful to point your feed reader at it as there's quite a diverse collection of content.
- Kovah 2y agoIf anyone also misses StumbleUpon, there's something similar: https://cloudhiker.net https://cloudhiker.net
- mjfl 2y agoIn the same spirit, here is a site devoted to getting off the centralized platforms: https://landchad.net/ https://landchad.net/
- sanjumsanthosh 2y agoWow this looks clean !
- janandonly 2y agoWonderful collection of how-to’s to run your own server. Thanks for sharing. Might I suggest (in the interest of privacy) that you give donators the option to use a Silent Payment address instead of a naked BYC address? I noticed you have a Monero address as well, so I assume you care about privacy
- janandonly 2y agoThis is now the 7th time someone shares this link on HN. It must be worth a read
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- raytopia 2y agoI feel like the internet needs a giant directory of indie websites. So you can actually surf around and find them. The big modern search engines almost have to be intentionally hiding these websites because they're nearly impossible to find without using an alternative engine like wiby.me or search.marginalia.nu.
- ramses0 2y agoI was just going to post a comment similar to this. We've swung towards walled gardens of piles of content instead of graphs of individually curated links. Exactly that "surfing" or "webring" or "stumbleupon" style of actually browsing in a larger content rather than searching or push-promote within that pile of content.
- dudinax 2y agoThe walled gardens are better for many of the internet's main uses. If I need to find out what vodka to buy I Google with site:reddit.com and pick the post that's obviously written by alcoholics. The small web can't touch that.
- dartos 2y agoI don’t think Google hides small sites as much as people are really good at SEO for Google specifically. Like my blog has literally 0 SEO and you’ll never find it, but a friend of mine has a blog where he does not post very often, but spends a lot of effort on SEO and it’s very easy to run into his blog. The SEO meta destroyed small blogs.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoIt's impossible to say this is something they do, but it's worth noting that Google also has an economic incentive to mostly show commercial/ad-ridden results, as leading users to blogs with no adsense on them make them less money; so it would at least be in their interest to let the search results look like they do. To fully understand Google you need to look at them not as a service that brings websites to people, but directs people to websites.
- freediver 2y agoOur contribution to the small web: https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb The site and list of blogs is open source, growing steadily by about 10 each day (almost at 15,000 at this point). Every recent post from sites in Kagi Small Web is indexed and given preference in Kagi Search results. How it works: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web edit: The project just had its one thousandth commit!
- Kye 2y agoIt's StumbleUpon without the spam problem. I like it.
- sbarre 2y agohttps://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ is also excellent. Someone else linked it elsewhere in the thread but worth riding the coat tails of the top post for anyone interested.
- philistine 2y agoI know the friction to add websites is the point, but might I recommend a way to add our own websites without having to promote two others. My rinkydink website qualifies, but all the other small websites I know are all already on the list.
- freediver 2y agoWe make it high effort as we want to prevent low effort submissions - we only have limited resources available to review.
- Teckla 2y agoOur contribution to the small web: https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb After opening this web page, I pressed down arrow a few times to scroll the page. At first, I didn't understand why it only scrolled a few pixels. It looks like there's a scrollable area within a scrollable area. The outermost scrollable area only scrolls a few pixels. This is a badly designed web page.
- 2y ago
- Jordan_Pelt 2y agoThank you for this. It has inspired me to delete my Reddit account and create an HN account. This gives me hope that the web can survive the social media era.
- righthand 2y agoWell this is social media too. Beware of shifting complexities!
- rambambram 2y agoMy list of shared links is here: https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&view=sharedlist https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&view=sharedlist It's basically all the sites and feeds I follow daily with the Hey Homepage built-in RSS reader. You can browse the list and click around, or download it as an OPML file. RSS = Really Social Sites; OPML = Other People's Meaningful Links
- xenodium 2y agoMy contribution to the small web is a lightweight blogging platform: https://lmno.lol https://lmno.lol My blog is at https://lmno.lol/alvaro https://lmno.lol/alvaro You can drag and drop your entire blog from a single markdown file https://indieweb.social/@xenodium/112265481282475542 https://indieweb.social/@xenodium/112265481282475542 You can read the blogs from anywhere, even terminal (no JS needed). No need to sign up or log in to try it out. I haven't officially launched, but if you'd like to start blogging now, I'll be happy to share an invite code.
- r85804306610 2y agoi've been publishing things as html2 pages, but not interconnected in any way. so each page (or sometimes group of pages) will be dedicated to an exploration of a single subject. i then send those pages to people who i think might be interested in them. that's all, they otherwise don't see the greater internet. of course people are free to add them to link aggregators, etc. but i don't police this practice. i simply don't care for my output to be consumed by general public, or by llms, or by corporate media, or by whomever who is not my friend or in my immediate immediate circle of friends
- kaeruct 2y agoOne site in this vein that I hope never goes away is https://rpgclassics.com/ https://rpgclassics.com/ I discovered it as a young lad lost when playing some RPGs on emulators in the early 2000s
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoSeems like a small web deserves a small client. Why use a "big web" client to read the small web. "Big web" clients are funded by advertising or advertising companies. Bias disclosure: I have used a text-only client for the last 30 years.
- AstroJetson 2y agoThere was a push during Covid on Gemini pages. I did that for awhile, but the lack of real formatting and not being able to cross link articles became a stopper. You can see get to some of them here Collaborative Directory of Geminispace: gemini://cdg.thegonz.net/ But you need a Gemini reader