11 ms·

The “small web” is bigger than you might think

561 points by speckx 8mo ago

lasgawe 8mo ago
mm, yeah. I like the idea of the small web not as a size category but as a mindset. people publishing for the sake of sharing rather than optimizing for attention or monetization.
- rapnie 8mo ago
  The fediverse is also generally experienced as a small web, where it comes to mindset. Though that is not always to the liking or preference of those expecting to find alternatives to big church social media platforms.
- apples_oranges 8mo ago
  Feeding llms you mean
  - stronglikedan 8mo ago
    they gotta eat too!
  - 8organicbits 8mo ago
    Is there a good free-but-subscriber-only solution for blogs? It seems like a contradiction, but in practice it may be manageable.
    - pixl97 8mo ago
      If it takes off in any amount, then LLMs will just subscribe and pull said data from sites at a reasonable pace (or not, it's free so make many accounts).
    - cosmicgadget 8mo ago
      Loginwall or email newsletter with a summary on the open web.
romaniv 8mo ago
Small Web, Indie Web and Gemini are terminally missing the point. The web in the 90s was an ecosystem that attracted people because of experimentation with the medium, diversity of content and certain free-spirited social defaults. It also attracted attention because it was a new, exciting and rapidly expanding phenomenon. To create something equivalent right now you would need to capture those properties, rather then try to revive old visual styles and technology. For a while I hoped that VR will become the new World Wide Web, but it was successfully torpedoed by the Metaverse initiative.
- SirFatty 8mo ago
  Which is exactly the point of Gemini.
  - skeeter2020 8mo ago
    I'm a dinosaur who bemoans the loss of whatever-it-was we had prior to the mass exploitation and saturation of the web today, so I feel it's my duty to check out Gemini and stop complaining. I'm prepared to trade ease of use or some modern functionality for better content and less of what the internet has become.
  - mattlondon 8mo ago
    Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining. The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination. Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me) It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.
upboundspiral 8mo ago
I think the article briefly touches on an important part: people still write blogs, but they are buried by Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com https://marginalia-search.com . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, writings, all by real people. I am always fascinated by what it unearths when using it, and it really is a breath of fresh air. It's currently funded by NLNet (temporarily) and the project's scope is really promising. It's one of those projects that I really hope succeeds long term. The old web is not dead, just buried, and it can be unearthed. In my opinion an independent non monetized search engine is a public good as valuable as the internet archive. So far as I know marginalia is the only project that instead of just taking google's index and massaging it a bit (like all the other search engines) is truly seeking to be independent and practical in its scope and goals.
- lich_king 8mo ago
  > Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. I don't think they do that. Instead, "usefulness" is mostly synonymous with commercial intent: searching for <x> often means "I want to buy <x>". Even for non-commercial queries, I think the sad reality is that most people subconsciously prefer LLM-generated or content-farmed stuff too. It looks more professional, has nice images (never mind that they're stock photos or AI-generated), etc. Your average student looking for an explanation of why the sky is blue is more interested in a TikTok-style short than some white-on-black or black-on-gray webpage that gives them 1990s vibes. TL;DR: I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want. It might be not what a small minority on HN wants.
  - BrenBarn 8mo ago
    > I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want. There is some truth in this, but to me it's similar to saying that a drug dealer gives their customers exactly what they want. People "want" those things because Google and its ilk have conditioned them to want those things.
susam 8mo ago
A little shell function I have in my ~/.zshrc: pages() { for _ in {1..5}; do curl -sSw '%header{location}\n' https://indieblog.page/random | sed 's/.utm.*//'; done } Here is an example output: $ pages https://alanpearce.eu/post/scriptura/ https://jmablog.com/post/numberones/ https://www.closingtags.com/blog/home-networking https://www.unsungnovelty.org/gallery/layers/ https://thoughts.uncountable.uk/now/ On macOS, we can also automatically open the random pages in the default web browser with: $ open $(pages) Another nice place to discover independently maintained personal websites is: https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb
- viscousviolin 8mo ago
  That's a lovely bit of automation.
  - deadbabe 8mo ago
    What do you mean automation, he’s not even using any AI agent!
- oooyay 8mo ago
  Caveat that Kagi gates that repo such that it doesn't allow self-submissions so you're only going to see a chunk of websites that other people have submitted that also know about the Kagi repo.
  - mxuribe 8mo ago
    But per the instructions, it seems like that if one wants to add your own website, then one needs to add 2 other small websites (that are not on the list already)...so technically it does open things up to those who are not aware of the repo...assuming their site is pulled in when someone wants to add their own website. Obviously this scale is slow...but i think that's kinda the point, eh? Nevertheless, for every 1 person wanting to add their stuff, 2 others would technically get added i guess. See: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb?tab=readme-ov-file#%EF%B8%8F-guidelines-for-adding-a-site-or-channel-to-the-list-%EF%B8%8F https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb?tab=readme-ov-file#%E...
heliumtera 8mo ago
How many would be left after removing self promotion, AI generated content and "how I use AI?"(Claude code like everybody else)
8organicbits 8mo ago
One objection I have to the kagi smallweb approach is the avoidance of infrequently updated sites. Some of my favorite blogs post very rarely; but when they post it's a great read. When I discover a great new blog that hasn't been updated in years I'm excited to add it to my feed reader, because it's a really good signal that when they publish again it will be worth reading.
- freediver 8mo ago
  To clarify criteria is less than 2 years since last blog post.
  - senko 8mo ago
    You may want to clarify that on https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb because the README there says: > Blog has recent posts (<7 days old) This may be different than inclusion criteria for websites in general, but on first read it looks like it has to be very active. I might have missed something while skimming it, but would assume others would miss it as well.
    - SyneRyder 8mo ago
      There's two criteria, I agree it's hard to skim: * The blog must have a recent post, no older than 12 months, to meet the recency criteria for inclusion. * Criteria for posts to show on the website: Blog has recent posts (<7 days old), The website can appear in an iframe The latter criteria is for the website / post to appear in Kagi's random Small Web feature, where they display the blog post in an iframe. (So I think only posts from the last week are displayed there.) Being on the list should ensure that any new posts could be displayed in Small Web though, and presumably that the website is indexed in Kagi's Teclis index as well. At least, I really hope that the Teclis index is including all of those old blog posts too, and not discarding them. EDIT: I just realized freediver actually is Vladimir - I'd love to know if Teclis does index all those older blog posts too. I assume it does index everything that is still present in the RSS feeds?
shermantanktop 8mo ago
This is a specific definition of "small web" which is even narrower than the one I normally think of. But reading about Gemini, it does make me wonder if the original sin is client-side dynamism. We could say: that's Javascript. But some Javascript operates only on the DOM. It's really XHR/fetch and friends that are the problem. We could say: CSS is ok. But CSS can fetch remote resources and if JS isn't there, I wonder how long it would take for ad vendors to have CSS-only solutions...or maybe they do already?
- akkartik 8mo ago
  Yeah, CSS is Turing Complete: https://lyra.horse/x86css https://lyra.horse/x86css
  - zahlman 8mo ago
    I wonder: what's the least that could be removed from CSS to avoid Turing-completeness?
- mattlondon 8mo ago
  You need to go more tin-foil-hat Its not just JavaScript, it's cookies, it's "auto loading" resources (e.g. 1x1 pixels with per-request unique URLs), it's third-party http requests to other domains (which might art cookies too). I think the XKCD comic about encryption-vs-wrench has never been more apt for Gemini the protocol...
- gzread 8mo ago
  Most of the problem with ads isn't even the ads these days, but the bloat. Static image ads would be a huge improvement.
- AdamN 8mo ago
  I would put it all on cookies. No third party cookies (at all) - good. JS and CSS and even autoplay video is fine as long as there are no third party cookies. That would make the Small Web bigger but it would get to the main point. I'd be fine with a site like the New Yorker that has more bells and whistles be included as long as I could experience it without a tracked ad from DoubleClick. Right now any serious outfit simply cannot be included in the Small Web but we really need companies there.
jmclnx 8mo ago
I moved my site to Gemini on sdf.org, I find it far easier to use and maintain. I also mirror it on gopher. Maintaining both is still easier than dealing with *panels or hosting my own. There is a lot of good content out there, for example: gemini://gemi.dev/ FWIW, dillo now has plugins for both Gemini and Gopher and the plugins work find on the various BSDs.
varun_ch 8mo ago
A fun trend on the "small web" is the use of 88x31 badges that link to friends websites or in webrings. I have a few on my website, and you can browse a ton of small web websites that way. https://varun.ch https://varun.ch (at the bottom of the page) There's also a couple directories/network graphs https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://eightyeightthirty.one/ https://eightyeightthirty.one/
- 101008 8mo ago
  A beautiful trend that has been going for 30 years ;-) One of the happiest moments of my childhood (I'm exagerating) was when my button was placed in that website that I loved to visit everyday. It was one of the best validations I ever received :)
  - skciva 8mo ago
    What inspired me to pursue computer related fields was making little badges and forum signatures in Photoshop as a teen. Heartwarming to see this tradition has persisted
    - Terr_ 8mo ago
      I can't be the only one with an ancient collection of artistically-mismatched "under construction" graphics.
      - lagniappe 8mo ago
        My favorite is the 'AOL Sucks!'
      - FinnKuhn 8mo ago
        Not mine, but I don't think you are: http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/
      - wkjagt 8mo ago
        Oh boy, I do miss the days of things being under construction. It meant people were actually constructing things.
myylogic 8mo ago
[flagged]
lich_king 8mo ago
It's easy to hand-curate a list of 5,000 "small web" URLs. The problem is scaling. For example, Kagi has a hand-curated "small web" filter, but I never use it because far more interesting and relevant "small web" websites are outside the filter than in it. The same is true for most other lists curated by individual folks. They're neat, but also sort of useless because they are too small: 95% of the things you're looking for are not there. The question is how do you take it to a million? There probably are at least that many good personal and non-commercial websites out there, but if you open it up, you invite spam & slop.
- freediver 8mo ago
  I mainly use Kagi Small Web as a starting point of my day, with my morning coffee. Especially now when categories are added, always find something worth reading. The size here does not present a problem as I would usually browse 20-30 sites this way.
  - lich_king 8mo ago
    Right, but that basically works as a retro alternative to scrolling through social media. If you're looking for something specific, it's simultaneously true that there's a small web page that answers your question and that it's not on any "small web" list because the owner of the webpage never submitted it there, or didn't meet the criteria for inclusion. For example, I have several non-commercial, personal websites that I think anyone would agree are "small web", but each of them fails the Kagi inclusion criteria for a different reason. One is not a blog, another is a blog but with the wrong cadence of posts, etc.
    - freediver 8mo ago
      Feel free to suggest changes to criteria for inclusion. It is mostly the way it is now as the entire project is maintained by one person - me :)
      - lich_king 8mo ago
afisxisto 8mo ago
Cool to see Gemini mentioned here. A few years back I created Station, Gemini's first "social network" of sorts, still running today: https://martinrue.com/station https://martinrue.com/station
freediver 8mo ago
Kagi Small Web has about 32K sites and I'd like to think that we have captured most of (english speaking) personal blogs out there (we are adding about 10 per day and a significant effort went into discovering/fidning them). It is kind of sad that the entire size of this small web is only 30k sites these days.
- Cyan488 8mo ago
  I'm noticing sites that break the rules. I report (flag) them, is that useful or should I just PR to remove them?
  - freediver 8mo ago
    PR is better!
- pil0u 8mo ago
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- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- savolai 8mo ago
  Does this use frames or iframe? https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb I would expect a raw link in the top bar to the page shown, to be able to bookmark it etc.
  - susam 8mo ago
    There is a '↗'-shaped icon in the navigation bar at the top. If you click on that it takes you to the original post in a new tab. On Firefox and Safari, you can also right click that icon and add the original post to the bookmarks.
    - savolai 8mo ago
      Not visible on iphone xs/13 mini.
tonymet 8mo ago
hats off to https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ and https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ for cataloging and featuring small web experiences
GuB-42 8mo ago
I don't expect many people to agree but I think that the "small web" should reject encryption, which is the opposite direction that Gemini is taking. I don't deny the importance of encryption, it is really what shaped the modern web, allowing for secure payment, private transfer of personal information, etc... See where I am getting at? Removing encryption means that you can't reasonably do financial transactions, accounts and access restriction, exchange of private information, etc... You only share what you want to share publicly, with no restrictions. It seriously limits commercial potential which is the point. It also helps technically. If you want to make a tiny web server, like on a microcontroller, encryption is the hardest part. In addition, TLS comes with expiring certificates, requiring regular maintenance, you can't just have your server and leave it alone for years, still working. It can also bring back simple caching proxies, great for poor connectivity. Two problems remain with the lack of encryption, first is authenticity. Anyone can man-in-the-middle and change the web page, TLS prevents that. But what I think is an even better solution is to do it at the content level: sign the content, like a GPG signature, not the server, this way you can guarantee the authenticity of the content, no matter where you are getting it from. The other thing is the usual argument about oppressive governments, etc... Well, if want to protect yourself, TLS won't save you, you will be given away by your IP address, they may not see exactly what you are looking at, but the simple fact you are connecting to a server containing sensitive data may be evidence enough. Protecting your identity is what networks like TOR are for, and you can hide a plain text server behind the TOR network, which would act as the privacy layer.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  Big thing that made encryption required is arguably that ISPs started injecting crap into webpages. Governments can still track you with little issue since SNI is unencrypted. It's also very likely that Cloudflare and the like are sharing what they see as they MITM 80% of your connections.
  - jopsen 8mo ago
    > It's also very likely that Cloudflare and the like are sharing what they see as they MITM 80% of your connections. Maybe, I suspect not, but even so if we reduce the number of men in the middle that's pretty nice.
productinventor 8mo ago
[flagged]
tonymet 8mo ago
I’m not sold on gemini. Less utility, weaker, immature tools. Investing on small HTTP based websites is the right direction. One could formalize it as a browser extension or small-web HTTP proxy that limits JS, dom size, cookie access etc using existing Web browsers & user agents.
hettygreen 8mo ago
[flagged]
- elashri 8mo ago
  Bro are you kidding? The whole point of small web is to avoid cooperations, AI and governments.
trinsic2 8mo ago
Can anyone point me to the best place to get castor going? I cant install it on my 22.04 install unmet dependencies...
627467 8mo ago
I read alot against monetization in the comments. I think because we are used monetization being so exploitative, filled with dark patterns and bad incentives on the Big Web. But it doesnt need to be thia way: small web can also be about sustainable monetization. In fact there's a whole page on that on https://indieweb.org/business-models https://indieweb.org/business-models There's nothing wrong with "publishers" aspiring to get paid.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago
  Yep. People have very short memories. I remember that ethical ad network in the late 2000s that all the cool tech bloggers would use.
- ardeaver 8mo ago
  I also think equating good = "no monetization" is exactly how we've ended up in a situation where everything is controlled by a few giant mega corps, hordes of MBAs, and unethical ad networks. We should want indie developers, writers, etc to make money so that the only game in town doesn't end up being those who didn't care about being ethical. </rant>
danhite 8mo ago
Isn't this a simple compute opportunity? ... > March 15 there were 1,251 updates [from feed of small websites ...] too active, to publish all the updates on a single page, even for just one day. Well, I could publish them, but nobody has time to read them all. if the reader accumulates a small set of whitelist keywords, perhaps selected via optionally generating a tag cloud ui, then that est. 1,251 likely drops to ~ single page (most days) if you wish to serve that as noscript it would suffice to partition in/visible content eg by <section class="keywords ..." and let the user apply css (or script by extension or bookmarklet/s) to reveal just their locally known interests
- 8organicbits 8mo ago
  The tag cloud part may be a challenge. Web feeds don't always tag their content. I have a blog filter that does something similar (https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/), but the UI I ended up with isn't great and too many things are uncategorized.
  - danhite 8mo ago
    Kudos on your site effort and I immediately see your point. In fact I took your topmost entry with no helpful site/update tags and dove in a little to try to understand why a RSS friendly blogger might not be passing along ~ tags for better reader discovery. Turns out my scarce info test case blogger has a mastodon that immediately lists all these tags about himself [I've stripped it down] ... #FrontEnd Developer #CSS #Halifax #London #Singapore Technical writer and rabbit-hole deep-diver Former Organiser for https://londonwebstandards.org https://londonwebstandards.org & https://stateofthebrowser.com https://stateofthebrowser.com Interests: #Bushcraft #Outdoors #DnD #Fantasy #SciFi #HipHop #CSS #Eleventy #IndieWeb #OpenSource #OpenWeb I conclude if he knew such site and post tags getting to RSS would be of use, he'd probably make the tiny effort to wire the descriptions. Nonetheless I merely crawled links for a minute to found this info, so I imagine something like the free tier of the Cloudflare crawling api might suffice over time for a simplistic automated fix to hint decorate blog sites. I mean, given that we're not trying to recreate pagerank, but just trying to tip the balance in favor of desirable initial discovery.
dwg 8mo ago
Love the irony: Man builds a Gemini-style feed aggregator for small web, finding it, well, not so small.
Gunax 8mo ago
It's sad how the snall web became invisible. I used to use all sorts of small websites in 2005. But by 2015 I used only about 10 large ones. Like many changes, I cannot pinpoint exactly when this happened. It just occurred to me someday that I do not run into many unusual websites any longer. It's unfortunate that so much of our behavior is dictated by Google. I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites. And like a highway closeure ripples through small town economies, it was barely noticed by travellers but devestating to recipients. What were once quaint sites became abandoned. The second force seems to be video. Because video is difficult and expensive to host, we moved away from websites. Travel blogs were replaced with travel vlogs. Tutorials became videos.
- Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
  > I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites. Small websites have small dollars?
  - Gunax 8mo ago
    Does Google get money for directing traffic to sites (barring sites that pay for ad placement, that is)? If I search for 'astronomy', Google doesnt earn any money whether i go to the Wikipedia page for astronomy, or Joe's astronomy site, right?
    - pixodaros 8mo ago
      Google gets money for showing ads and sponsored content on the search page. If you click on a site with Google ads or Google scripts, it gets more money and monetarizable PII. So its in their interest to prioritize sites with Google ads or Google services, but only Google staffers know exactly how the search algorithm works. A few years ago they upranked all results on a few trusted domains, so many of those domains filled up with advertising and cheap copywritten content. They framed this as 'fighting misinformation.'
    - type0 8mo ago
ZebrasEat 8mo ago
Has there been any effort in taking any of these small web type approaches into a headscale type space? My preferences would be to have a private area where whitelisting prevents crawling or scraping. Am baffled why someone hasn’t created a headscale server and started distributing nodes to personally known ‘good intentioned’ humans. Anyone ever heard of anything like this?
- esseph 8mo ago
  Parts of the "dark web" are built somewhat like this
- 8organicbits 8mo ago
  Reminds me of https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/ https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/
graemep 8mo ago
Edited text out as posted in wrong thread.
- mtmail 8mo ago
  The comment belongs to this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401809
  - graemep 8mo ago
    Thanks.
pipeline_peak 8mo ago
Every answer I’ve seen to corporate internet whether it be Mastodon or Gemini just sounds like shell script slab city. Just another place for hackers to go and keep to themselves. Non tech people, who needs them! In shelf script slab city, we can share cooking recipes in plaintext. Just spin up your instance, map it to a port, initialize the listener daemon, download the cli viewer…and you’re in shell script slab city! Who needs Twitter
constructrurl 8mo ago
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oxag3n 8mo ago
> To be fair, I should point out that the “small” web was never defined by the number of sites, but by the lack of commercial influence. That was my understanding before it grew - it's a web of small indie sites.
shevy-java 8mo ago
I welcome all and every attempt to "rescue" the world wide web how it once was, even if modernized. I see this every time I try to use google search - google ruined the search engine. That was not a mistake; that was not an accident. The goal is to divvy up the world wide web into commercial interests that help sustain the google empire; the fight google waged against ublock origin also shows this. I have no idea if Gemini can help revitalize the small web or not; I am a pessimist b nature so who knows. I fear so many things have changed in the last 20-30 years that some things may be permanently lost. For instance, in the early 2000s or so, a local university offered personal homepages for every student. This stopped in like 2010 or so. And never came back. At any rate, I welcome any idea to try to rescue the part of the world wide web not already destroyed by commercial interests. People seem to use private entities though; I saw that with discord. Then compared it to oldschool mIRC on freenode or galaxynet. Discord is private. I hate that.
PeteAyscough 8mo ago
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ontehfritz 8mo ago
Just because this is relevant to the small web and started off as just that ... so I am going to do a very shameful post as I am the creator: https://www.demarkus.io/ https://www.demarkus.io/ https://github.com/latebit-io/demarkus https://github.com/latebit-io/demarkus Mark protocol, with client tools, tui, server, and mcp (yes I know, hype train, but useful for agents) only markdown format. Simple :)
qudat 8mo ago
I built https://prose.sh https://prose.sh as part of my journey into Gemini and back out. Ya, it's just a simple blog, but you can completely manage it with ssh and is compatible with hugo when people want to eject. We also recently released support for plain-text-lists which is a gemini-inspired spec that use lists as its foundational structure. https://pico.sh/plain-text-lists https://pico.sh/plain-text-lists example: https://blog.pico.sh/ann-034-plain-text-lists https://blog.pico.sh/ann-034-plain-text-lists
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
followdev 8mo ago
I built FollowDev.com which is like Kagi Small Web but for software developer blogs. It has about 1000 blogs in the repo at the moment. Discovering was the most time consuming part.
ryan14975 8mo ago
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october8140 8mo ago
Podnet on Picotron.
renegat0x0 8mo ago
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Peteragain 8mo ago
I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities exist? A real question - not rhetorical. Whatever the answer, I am sure the same mechanism could "pay for" public hosting.
- zeusdclxvi 8mo ago
  Are you asking why public libraries exist?
  - Peteragain 8mo ago
    More how they exist.
- pipeline_peak 8mo ago
  You want the government to fund the small web?
  - Peteragain 8mo ago
    The government funds some libraries, and for some publicly acceptable reason. That reason should apply to web infrastructure, and indeed the small web. Other libraries are community run. Again whatever motivates that probably applies to small web stuff.
wink 8mo ago
I don't want to be part of the "small web" - I want to be part of the web. If my stuff can't be found in a sea of a million ad-ridden whatever sites so be it, but I am not going out of my way to submit stuff to special search engines or web rings, I've been there in the 90s.
- DeathArrow 8mo ago
  My point also: I rather see the existing web transformed than being part of some obscure circles that not many people care about.
  - plewd 8mo ago
    I doubt the web will allow itself to be transformed into our idealized version of it, so the question seems to just be: do you want to be part of the obscure circle or not? Neither choice is right or wrong, but I like the idea of a cool community amidst the enshittification of the rest of the web.
DeathArrow 8mo ago
But if people want to keep sites free of commercial influences can't they do that with existing technologies? Do they really need to use some exotic technologies which have the side effect of limiting the commercial use? My point is that by using exotic tech, they limit the general public exposure to the "un-commercial web".
ang_cire 8mo ago
I remember the days of just chatting with folks on No Mutants Allowed (fallout fan forum) or SubSim.com, about life and stuff. We all sort of knew each other after years chatting about the games we played, and it felt so cozy and low-stakes. I recently jumped back onto IRC Rizon, and man, what a throwback. The small web really is MUCH bigger when you start adding other protocols like IRC and onion sites.
draxil 8mo ago
I think Gemini might be wise to rename, now there's a commercial product trampling all over it's namespace.
- jonasced 8mo ago
  However if it's supposed to continue being an indie protocol and fly under the radar, it's perfect
KurSix 8mo ago
The funny thing is that RSS solved the "too many websites" problem 20 years ago
shadowbyte17 8mo ago
the 88x31 badge thing is wild, i remember seeing those back in the early 2000s. it’s a really interesting way to build connections.
ldsjunior 8mo ago
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SeanDav 8mo ago
With the increasingly intrusive legislated age verification and content monitoring being forced globally, I can easily see this as a catalyst to drive the Gemini protocol past critical mass.
Restless_Egg55 8mo ago
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damnesian 8mo ago
Been spending a lot more time on the small web lately, deliberate choice, what can I do? how can I replace things in my workflow? Would love to see this trend explode.

561 points by speckx 8mo ago

mm, yeah. I like the idea of the small web not as a size category but as a mindset. people publishing for the sake of sharing rather than optimizing for attention or monetization.

rapnie 8mo ago
The fediverse is also generally experienced as a small web, where it comes to mindset. Though that is not always to the liking or preference of those expecting to find alternatives to big church social media platforms.
apples_oranges 8mo ago
Feeding llms you mean
- stronglikedan 8mo ago
  they gotta eat too!
- 8organicbits 8mo ago
  Is there a good free-but-subscriber-only solution for blogs? It seems like a contradiction, but in practice it may be manageable.
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    If it takes off in any amount, then LLMs will just subscribe and pull said data from sites at a reasonable pace (or not, it's free so make many accounts).
  - cosmicgadget 8mo ago
    Loginwall or email newsletter with a summary on the open web.

romaniv 8mo ago

Small Web, Indie Web and Gemini are terminally missing the point. The web in the 90s was an ecosystem that attracted people because of experimentation with the medium, diversity of content and certain free-spirited social defaults. It also attracted attention because it was a new, exciting and rapidly expanding phenomenon. To create something equivalent right now you would need to capture those properties, rather then try to revive old visual styles and technology. For a while I hoped that VR will become the new World Wide Web, but it was successfully torpedoed by the Metaverse initiative.

SirFatty 8mo ago
Which is exactly the point of Gemini.
- skeeter2020 8mo ago
  I'm a dinosaur who bemoans the loss of whatever-it-was we had prior to the mass exploitation and saturation of the web today, so I feel it's my duty to check out Gemini and stop complaining. I'm prepared to trade ease of use or some modern functionality for better content and less of what the internet has become.
- mattlondon 8mo ago
  Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining. The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination. Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me) It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.

upboundspiral 8mo ago

I think the article briefly touches on an important part: people still write blogs, but they are buried by Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com https://marginalia-search.com . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, writings, all by real people. I am always fascinated by what it unearths when using it, and it really is a breath of fresh air. It's currently funded by NLNet (temporarily) and the project's scope is really promising. It's one of those projects that I really hope succeeds long term. The old web is not dead, just buried, and it can be unearthed. In my opinion an independent non monetized search engine is a public good as valuable as the internet archive. So far as I know marginalia is the only project that instead of just taking google's index and massaging it a bit (like all the other search engines) is truly seeking to be independent and practical in its scope and goals.

lich_king 8mo ago
> Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. I don't think they do that. Instead, "usefulness" is mostly synonymous with commercial intent: searching for <x> often means "I want to buy <x>". Even for non-commercial queries, I think the sad reality is that most people subconsciously prefer LLM-generated or content-farmed stuff too. It looks more professional, has nice images (never mind that they're stock photos or AI-generated), etc. Your average student looking for an explanation of why the sky is blue is more interested in a TikTok-style short than some white-on-black or black-on-gray webpage that gives them 1990s vibes. TL;DR: I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want. It might be not what a small minority on HN wants.
- BrenBarn 8mo ago
  > I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want. There is some truth in this, but to me it's similar to saying that a drug dealer gives their customers exactly what they want. People "want" those things because Google and its ilk have conditioned them to want those things.

susam 8mo ago

A little shell function I have in my ~/.zshrc: pages() { for _ in {1..5}; do curl -sSw '%header{location}\n' https://indieblog.page/random | sed 's/.utm.*//'; done } Here is an example output: $ pages https://alanpearce.eu/post/scriptura/ https://jmablog.com/post/numberones/ https://www.closingtags.com/blog/home-networking https://www.unsungnovelty.org/gallery/layers/ https://thoughts.uncountable.uk/now/ On macOS, we can also automatically open the random pages in the default web browser with: $ open $(pages) Another nice place to discover independently maintained personal websites is: https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb

viscousviolin 8mo ago
That's a lovely bit of automation.
- deadbabe 8mo ago
  What do you mean automation, he’s not even using any AI agent!
oooyay 8mo ago
Caveat that Kagi gates that repo such that it doesn't allow self-submissions so you're only going to see a chunk of websites that other people have submitted that also know about the Kagi repo.
- mxuribe 8mo ago
  But per the instructions, it seems like that if one wants to add your own website, then one needs to add 2 other small websites (that are not on the list already)...so technically it does open things up to those who are not aware of the repo...assuming their site is pulled in when someone wants to add their own website. Obviously this scale is slow...but i think that's kinda the point, eh? Nevertheless, for every 1 person wanting to add their stuff, 2 others would technically get added i guess. See: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb?tab=readme-ov-file#%EF%B8%8F-guidelines-for-adding-a-site-or-channel-to-the-list-%EF%B8%8F https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb?tab=readme-ov-file#%E...

heliumtera 8mo ago

How many would be left after removing self promotion, AI generated content and "how I use AI?"(Claude code like everybody else)

8organicbits 8mo ago

One objection I have to the kagi smallweb approach is the avoidance of infrequently updated sites. Some of my favorite blogs post very rarely; but when they post it's a great read. When I discover a great new blog that hasn't been updated in years I'm excited to add it to my feed reader, because it's a really good signal that when they publish again it will be worth reading.

freediver 8mo ago
To clarify criteria is less than 2 years since last blog post.
- senko 8mo ago
  You may want to clarify that on https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb because the README there says: > Blog has recent posts (<7 days old) This may be different than inclusion criteria for websites in general, but on first read it looks like it has to be very active. I might have missed something while skimming it, but would assume others would miss it as well.
  - SyneRyder 8mo ago
    There's two criteria, I agree it's hard to skim: * The blog must have a recent post, no older than 12 months, to meet the recency criteria for inclusion. * Criteria for posts to show on the website: Blog has recent posts (<7 days old), The website can appear in an iframe The latter criteria is for the website / post to appear in Kagi's random Small Web feature, where they display the blog post in an iframe. (So I think only posts from the last week are displayed there.) Being on the list should ensure that any new posts could be displayed in Small Web though, and presumably that the website is indexed in Kagi's Teclis index as well. At least, I really hope that the Teclis index is including all of those old blog posts too, and not discarding them. EDIT: I just realized freediver actually is Vladimir - I'd love to know if Teclis does index all those older blog posts too. I assume it does index everything that is still present in the RSS feeds?

shermantanktop 8mo ago

This is a specific definition of "small web" which is even narrower than the one I normally think of. But reading about Gemini, it does make me wonder if the original sin is client-side dynamism. We could say: that's Javascript. But some Javascript operates only on the DOM. It's really XHR/fetch and friends that are the problem. We could say: CSS is ok. But CSS can fetch remote resources and if JS isn't there, I wonder how long it would take for ad vendors to have CSS-only solutions...or maybe they do already?

akkartik 8mo ago
Yeah, CSS is Turing Complete: https://lyra.horse/x86css https://lyra.horse/x86css
- zahlman 8mo ago
  I wonder: what's the least that could be removed from CSS to avoid Turing-completeness?
mattlondon 8mo ago
You need to go more tin-foil-hat Its not just JavaScript, it's cookies, it's "auto loading" resources (e.g. 1x1 pixels with per-request unique URLs), it's third-party http requests to other domains (which might art cookies too). I think the XKCD comic about encryption-vs-wrench has never been more apt for Gemini the protocol...
gzread 8mo ago
Most of the problem with ads isn't even the ads these days, but the bloat. Static image ads would be a huge improvement.
AdamN 8mo ago
I would put it all on cookies. No third party cookies (at all) - good. JS and CSS and even autoplay video is fine as long as there are no third party cookies. That would make the Small Web bigger but it would get to the main point. I'd be fine with a site like the New Yorker that has more bells and whistles be included as long as I could experience it without a tracked ad from DoubleClick. Right now any serious outfit simply cannot be included in the Small Web but we really need companies there.

jmclnx 8mo ago

I moved my site to Gemini on sdf.org, I find it far easier to use and maintain. I also mirror it on gopher. Maintaining both is still easier than dealing with *panels or hosting my own. There is a lot of good content out there, for example: gemini://gemi.dev/ FWIW, dillo now has plugins for both Gemini and Gopher and the plugins work find on the various BSDs.

varun_ch 8mo ago

A fun trend on the "small web" is the use of 88x31 badges that link to friends websites or in webrings. I have a few on my website, and you can browse a ton of small web websites that way. https://varun.ch https://varun.ch (at the bottom of the page) There's also a couple directories/network graphs https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://eightyeightthirty.one/ https://eightyeightthirty.one/

101008 8mo ago
A beautiful trend that has been going for 30 years ;-) One of the happiest moments of my childhood (I'm exagerating) was when my button was placed in that website that I loved to visit everyday. It was one of the best validations I ever received :)
- skciva 8mo ago
  What inspired me to pursue computer related fields was making little badges and forum signatures in Photoshop as a teen. Heartwarming to see this tradition has persisted
  - Terr_ 8mo ago
    I can't be the only one with an ancient collection of artistically-mismatched "under construction" graphics.
    - lagniappe 8mo ago
      My favorite is the 'AOL Sucks!'
    - FinnKuhn 8mo ago
      Not mine, but I don't think you are: http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/
    - wkjagt 8mo ago
      Oh boy, I do miss the days of things being under construction. It meant people were actually constructing things.

myylogic 8mo ago

[flagged]

lich_king 8mo ago

It's easy to hand-curate a list of 5,000 "small web" URLs. The problem is scaling. For example, Kagi has a hand-curated "small web" filter, but I never use it because far more interesting and relevant "small web" websites are outside the filter than in it. The same is true for most other lists curated by individual folks. They're neat, but also sort of useless because they are too small: 95% of the things you're looking for are not there. The question is how do you take it to a million? There probably are at least that many good personal and non-commercial websites out there, but if you open it up, you invite spam & slop.

freediver 8mo ago
I mainly use Kagi Small Web as a starting point of my day, with my morning coffee. Especially now when categories are added, always find something worth reading. The size here does not present a problem as I would usually browse 20-30 sites this way.
- lich_king 8mo ago
  Right, but that basically works as a retro alternative to scrolling through social media. If you're looking for something specific, it's simultaneously true that there's a small web page that answers your question and that it's not on any "small web" list because the owner of the webpage never submitted it there, or didn't meet the criteria for inclusion. For example, I have several non-commercial, personal websites that I think anyone would agree are "small web", but each of them fails the Kagi inclusion criteria for a different reason. One is not a blog, another is a blog but with the wrong cadence of posts, etc.
  - freediver 8mo ago
    Feel free to suggest changes to criteria for inclusion. It is mostly the way it is now as the entire project is maintained by one person - me :)
    - lich_king 8mo ago

afisxisto 8mo ago

Cool to see Gemini mentioned here. A few years back I created Station, Gemini's first "social network" of sorts, still running today: https://martinrue.com/station https://martinrue.com/station

freediver 8mo ago

Kagi Small Web has about 32K sites and I'd like to think that we have captured most of (english speaking) personal blogs out there (we are adding about 10 per day and a significant effort went into discovering/fidning them). It is kind of sad that the entire size of this small web is only 30k sites these days.

Cyan488 8mo ago
I'm noticing sites that break the rules. I report (flag) them, is that useful or should I just PR to remove them?
- freediver 8mo ago
  PR is better!
pil0u 8mo ago
[dead]
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
savolai 8mo ago
Does this use frames or iframe? https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb I would expect a raw link in the top bar to the page shown, to be able to bookmark it etc.
- susam 8mo ago
  There is a '↗'-shaped icon in the navigation bar at the top. If you click on that it takes you to the original post in a new tab. On Firefox and Safari, you can also right click that icon and add the original post to the bookmarks.
  - savolai 8mo ago
    Not visible on iphone xs/13 mini.

tonymet 8mo ago

hats off to https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ and https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ for cataloging and featuring small web experiences

GuB-42 8mo ago

I don't expect many people to agree but I think that the "small web" should reject encryption, which is the opposite direction that Gemini is taking. I don't deny the importance of encryption, it is really what shaped the modern web, allowing for secure payment, private transfer of personal information, etc... See where I am getting at? Removing encryption means that you can't reasonably do financial transactions, accounts and access restriction, exchange of private information, etc... You only share what you want to share publicly, with no restrictions. It seriously limits commercial potential which is the point. It also helps technically. If you want to make a tiny web server, like on a microcontroller, encryption is the hardest part. In addition, TLS comes with expiring certificates, requiring regular maintenance, you can't just have your server and leave it alone for years, still working. It can also bring back simple caching proxies, great for poor connectivity. Two problems remain with the lack of encryption, first is authenticity. Anyone can man-in-the-middle and change the web page, TLS prevents that. But what I think is an even better solution is to do it at the content level: sign the content, like a GPG signature, not the server, this way you can guarantee the authenticity of the content, no matter where you are getting it from. The other thing is the usual argument about oppressive governments, etc... Well, if want to protect yourself, TLS won't save you, you will be given away by your IP address, they may not see exactly what you are looking at, but the simple fact you are connecting to a server containing sensitive data may be evidence enough. Protecting your identity is what networks like TOR are for, and you can hide a plain text server behind the TOR network, which would act as the privacy layer.

marginalia_nu 8mo ago
Big thing that made encryption required is arguably that ISPs started injecting crap into webpages. Governments can still track you with little issue since SNI is unencrypted. It's also very likely that Cloudflare and the like are sharing what they see as they MITM 80% of your connections.
- jopsen 8mo ago
  > It's also very likely that Cloudflare and the like are sharing what they see as they MITM 80% of your connections. Maybe, I suspect not, but even so if we reduce the number of men in the middle that's pretty nice.

productinventor 8mo ago

[flagged]

tonymet 8mo ago

I’m not sold on gemini. Less utility, weaker, immature tools. Investing on small HTTP based websites is the right direction. One could formalize it as a browser extension or small-web HTTP proxy that limits JS, dom size, cookie access etc using existing Web browsers & user agents.

hettygreen 8mo ago

[flagged]

elashri 8mo ago
Bro are you kidding? The whole point of small web is to avoid cooperations, AI and governments.

trinsic2 8mo ago

Can anyone point me to the best place to get castor going? I cant install it on my 22.04 install unmet dependencies...

627467 8mo ago

I read alot against monetization in the comments. I think because we are used monetization being so exploitative, filled with dark patterns and bad incentives on the Big Web. But it doesnt need to be thia way: small web can also be about sustainable monetization. In fact there's a whole page on that on https://indieweb.org/business-models https://indieweb.org/business-models There's nothing wrong with "publishers" aspiring to get paid.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago
Yep. People have very short memories. I remember that ethical ad network in the late 2000s that all the cool tech bloggers would use.
ardeaver 8mo ago
I also think equating good = "no monetization" is exactly how we've ended up in a situation where everything is controlled by a few giant mega corps, hordes of MBAs, and unethical ad networks. We should want indie developers, writers, etc to make money so that the only game in town doesn't end up being those who didn't care about being ethical. </rant>

danhite 8mo ago

Isn't this a simple compute opportunity? ... > March 15 there were 1,251 updates [from feed of small websites ...] too active, to publish all the updates on a single page, even for just one day. Well, I could publish them, but nobody has time to read them all. if the reader accumulates a small set of whitelist keywords, perhaps selected via optionally generating a tag cloud ui, then that est. 1,251 likely drops to ~ single page (most days) if you wish to serve that as noscript it would suffice to partition in/visible content eg by <section class="keywords ..." and let the user apply css (or script by extension or bookmarklet/s) to reveal just their locally known interests

8organicbits 8mo ago
The tag cloud part may be a challenge. Web feeds don't always tag their content. I have a blog filter that does something similar (https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/), but the UI I ended up with isn't great and too many things are uncategorized.
- danhite 8mo ago
  Kudos on your site effort and I immediately see your point. In fact I took your topmost entry with no helpful site/update tags and dove in a little to try to understand why a RSS friendly blogger might not be passing along ~ tags for better reader discovery. Turns out my scarce info test case blogger has a mastodon that immediately lists all these tags about himself [I've stripped it down] ... #FrontEnd Developer #CSS #Halifax #London #Singapore Technical writer and rabbit-hole deep-diver Former Organiser for https://londonwebstandards.org https://londonwebstandards.org & https://stateofthebrowser.com https://stateofthebrowser.com Interests: #Bushcraft #Outdoors #DnD #Fantasy #SciFi #HipHop #CSS #Eleventy #IndieWeb #OpenSource #OpenWeb I conclude if he knew such site and post tags getting to RSS would be of use, he'd probably make the tiny effort to wire the descriptions. Nonetheless I merely crawled links for a minute to found this info, so I imagine something like the free tier of the Cloudflare crawling api might suffice over time for a simplistic automated fix to hint decorate blog sites. I mean, given that we're not trying to recreate pagerank, but just trying to tip the balance in favor of desirable initial discovery.

dwg 8mo ago

Love the irony: Man builds a Gemini-style feed aggregator for small web, finding it, well, not so small.

Gunax 8mo ago

It's sad how the snall web became invisible. I used to use all sorts of small websites in 2005. But by 2015 I used only about 10 large ones. Like many changes, I cannot pinpoint exactly when this happened. It just occurred to me someday that I do not run into many unusual websites any longer. It's unfortunate that so much of our behavior is dictated by Google. I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites. And like a highway closeure ripples through small town economies, it was barely noticed by travellers but devestating to recipients. What were once quaint sites became abandoned. The second force seems to be video. Because video is difficult and expensive to host, we moved away from websites. Travel blogs were replaced with travel vlogs. Tutorials became videos.

Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
> I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites. Small websites have small dollars?
- Gunax 8mo ago
  Does Google get money for directing traffic to sites (barring sites that pay for ad placement, that is)? If I search for 'astronomy', Google doesnt earn any money whether i go to the Wikipedia page for astronomy, or Joe's astronomy site, right?
  - pixodaros 8mo ago
    Google gets money for showing ads and sponsored content on the search page. If you click on a site with Google ads or Google scripts, it gets more money and monetarizable PII. So its in their interest to prioritize sites with Google ads or Google services, but only Google staffers know exactly how the search algorithm works. A few years ago they upranked all results on a few trusted domains, so many of those domains filled up with advertising and cheap copywritten content. They framed this as 'fighting misinformation.'
  - type0 8mo ago

ZebrasEat 8mo ago

Has there been any effort in taking any of these small web type approaches into a headscale type space? My preferences would be to have a private area where whitelisting prevents crawling or scraping. Am baffled why someone hasn’t created a headscale server and started distributing nodes to personally known ‘good intentioned’ humans. Anyone ever heard of anything like this?

esseph 8mo ago
Parts of the "dark web" are built somewhat like this
8organicbits 8mo ago
Reminds me of https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/ https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/

graemep 8mo ago

Edited text out as posted in wrong thread.

mtmail 8mo ago
The comment belongs to this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401809
- graemep 8mo ago
  Thanks.

pipeline_peak 8mo ago

Every answer I’ve seen to corporate internet whether it be Mastodon or Gemini just sounds like shell script slab city. Just another place for hackers to go and keep to themselves. Non tech people, who needs them! In shelf script slab city, we can share cooking recipes in plaintext. Just spin up your instance, map it to a port, initialize the listener daemon, download the cli viewer…and you’re in shell script slab city! Who needs Twitter

constructrurl 8mo ago

[dead]

oxag3n 8mo ago

> To be fair, I should point out that the “small” web was never defined by the number of sites, but by the lack of commercial influence. That was my understanding before it grew - it's a web of small indie sites.

shevy-java 8mo ago

I welcome all and every attempt to "rescue" the world wide web how it once was, even if modernized. I see this every time I try to use google search - google ruined the search engine. That was not a mistake; that was not an accident. The goal is to divvy up the world wide web into commercial interests that help sustain the google empire; the fight google waged against ublock origin also shows this. I have no idea if Gemini can help revitalize the small web or not; I am a pessimist b nature so who knows. I fear so many things have changed in the last 20-30 years that some things may be permanently lost. For instance, in the early 2000s or so, a local university offered personal homepages for every student. This stopped in like 2010 or so. And never came back. At any rate, I welcome any idea to try to rescue the part of the world wide web not already destroyed by commercial interests. People seem to use private entities though; I saw that with discord. Then compared it to oldschool mIRC on freenode or galaxynet. Discord is private. I hate that.

PeteAyscough 8mo ago

[dead]

ontehfritz 8mo ago

Just because this is relevant to the small web and started off as just that ... so I am going to do a very shameful post as I am the creator: https://www.demarkus.io/ https://www.demarkus.io/ https://github.com/latebit-io/demarkus https://github.com/latebit-io/demarkus Mark protocol, with client tools, tui, server, and mcp (yes I know, hype train, but useful for agents) only markdown format. Simple :)

qudat 8mo ago

I built https://prose.sh https://prose.sh as part of my journey into Gemini and back out. Ya, it's just a simple blog, but you can completely manage it with ssh and is compatible with hugo when people want to eject. We also recently released support for plain-text-lists which is a gemini-inspired spec that use lists as its foundational structure. https://pico.sh/plain-text-lists https://pico.sh/plain-text-lists example: https://blog.pico.sh/ann-034-plain-text-lists https://blog.pico.sh/ann-034-plain-text-lists

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

followdev 8mo ago

I built FollowDev.com which is like Kagi Small Web but for software developer blogs. It has about 1000 blogs in the repo at the moment. Discovering was the most time consuming part.

ryan14975 8mo ago

[dead]

october8140 8mo ago

Podnet on Picotron.

renegat0x0 8mo ago

[dead]

Peteragain 8mo ago

I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities exist? A real question - not rhetorical. Whatever the answer, I am sure the same mechanism could "pay for" public hosting.

zeusdclxvi 8mo ago
Are you asking why public libraries exist?
- Peteragain 8mo ago
  More how they exist.
pipeline_peak 8mo ago
You want the government to fund the small web?
- Peteragain 8mo ago
  The government funds some libraries, and for some publicly acceptable reason. That reason should apply to web infrastructure, and indeed the small web. Other libraries are community run. Again whatever motivates that probably applies to small web stuff.

wink 8mo ago

I don't want to be part of the "small web" - I want to be part of the web. If my stuff can't be found in a sea of a million ad-ridden whatever sites so be it, but I am not going out of my way to submit stuff to special search engines or web rings, I've been there in the 90s.

DeathArrow 8mo ago
My point also: I rather see the existing web transformed than being part of some obscure circles that not many people care about.
- plewd 8mo ago
  I doubt the web will allow itself to be transformed into our idealized version of it, so the question seems to just be: do you want to be part of the obscure circle or not? Neither choice is right or wrong, but I like the idea of a cool community amidst the enshittification of the rest of the web.

DeathArrow 8mo ago

But if people want to keep sites free of commercial influences can't they do that with existing technologies? Do they really need to use some exotic technologies which have the side effect of limiting the commercial use? My point is that by using exotic tech, they limit the general public exposure to the "un-commercial web".

ang_cire 8mo ago

I remember the days of just chatting with folks on No Mutants Allowed (fallout fan forum) or SubSim.com, about life and stuff. We all sort of knew each other after years chatting about the games we played, and it felt so cozy and low-stakes. I recently jumped back onto IRC Rizon, and man, what a throwback. The small web really is MUCH bigger when you start adding other protocols like IRC and onion sites.

draxil 8mo ago

I think Gemini might be wise to rename, now there's a commercial product trampling all over it's namespace.

jonasced 8mo ago
However if it's supposed to continue being an indie protocol and fly under the radar, it's perfect

KurSix 8mo ago

The funny thing is that RSS solved the "too many websites" problem 20 years ago

shadowbyte17 8mo ago

the 88x31 badge thing is wild, i remember seeing those back in the early 2000s. it’s a really interesting way to build connections.

ldsjunior 8mo ago

[dead]

SeanDav 8mo ago

With the increasingly intrusive legislated age verification and content monitoring being forced globally, I can easily see this as a catalyst to drive the Gemini protocol past critical mass.

Restless_Egg55 8mo ago

[dead]

damnesian 8mo ago

Been spending a lot more time on the small web lately, deliberate choice, what can I do? how can I replace things in my workflow? Would love to see this trend explode.