What is the small web? (2020)

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.

Make a hardware box that serves as a router, switch AND a home server, sell it at competitive prices, have it preloaded with a hardened Linux containing everything needed (including NAS, VPN, home media organizers and whatnot), make it automatically discover other such nodes (and maybe configure lend-able bandwidth and disk space while you are at it; decentralization!), and then we're talking.

Make it 100% transparent, automatic, fault-proof and as speedy as you can so that the regular Joe and Jane can just install it at home because they heard it's a router and a home server in one and it's costing less than other similar solutions. Tell them it can stream from YouTube and 10 other apps.

Make the regular people tempted to buy it! Only THEN will the "small web" or any such adjacent sentiments take off. Ain't ever happening before that.

Enough with the "raising awareness" stuff, seriously. We on HN / Lobsters and a lot of people on Reddit are quite "aware" already. We get it. But 99% of us have families to feed and seriously can't squeeze the effort unless we're willing to forfeit the precious 5-10% free time a time a day that we get as busy adults.

Make something that will bring the regular people on board. Before that you are just a small fly in an airplane hangar trying to buzz and make a difference.

Ain't happening, dude. Roll up your sleeves and start inventing the future. If you have the time to craft such an article then you likely have the time to start working on the practical aspect as well.

And the way to make it a mass product is to make it friendly for the regular users. I feel that a lot of HN-ers get lost in rabbit holes of uber-complex VPN setups or how do you make a Kubernetes clusters of RPi machines, or how do you 3D-print a case for that etc.

Not going to try and dictate what people should work on in their free time, obviously. I am only targeting such preachy articles and organizations. If they have the budget to market some future that they are not inventing yet then maybe they should reallocate some budget to actually inventing it as well.