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.
What is the small web? (2020)
81–90 of 126 posts
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#82The 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.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#83> 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.
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.
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.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#84Interesting to see no one mentioned 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.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#85The *.small-web.com thing rubs me the wrong way, going entirely against the stated purpose: https://you.small-web.com is only a little better than 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…
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.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#86The 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 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.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#87The 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...
at least they're not calling them 'lusers' as was so common back then
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#88> 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.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#89> 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.
I am pretty sure that this sentence is an attempt at deadpan humor.
Re: What is the small web? (2020)
#90The *.small-web.com thing rubs me the wrong way, going entirely against the stated purpose: https://you.small-web.com is only a little better than 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…
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 unders…
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.