> I figured this is a good place as any to see if anybody else has been exploring this question Sure, tons of articles about similar efforts if you search for

> I figured this is a good place as any to see if anybody else has been exploring this question Sure, tons of articles about similar efforts if you search for the term 'small web'. In particular, I like gemini and tildes (tilde.town, tilde.team, tilde.club, etc) which are actually pretty neat if you take the time to ssh in and checkout the ecosystems they've built. The tildes in particular might surprise you, gemini can be a bit of a ghost town if you don't know where to look though. Tildes technically aren't public since you have to login to them, but they're not that different from social media in that respect (and since membership usually involves messaging the server owner personally, it's hard to imagine bot activity getting too bad). Gemini is public but you have to use a (usually terminal-based) browser program in order to interact with it and usually self-host a gemlog if you want a 'website' on it. These communities make me happy because you tend to find people who use xmpp or IRC or alternative platforms there and kinda get away from the enshittification loop. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, and I'm sure since this is HN I'm going to get some very snarky responses for mentioning these things as alternatives, but my experiences with exploring the communities around these technologies have consistently made me smile, which is downright weird in the current year. It's got me considering checking out usenet, which I'm too young to have used before outside of direct downloads. In retrospect, it's funny because all of the things I mentioned are technically 'not the internet', which might honestly be your answer.