The “small web” is bigger than you might think
kevinboone.me
The “small web” is bigger than you might think
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Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
#2mm, 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.
Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
#3mm, 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.
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.
Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
#4mm, 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.
Feeding llms you mean
Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
#5Small 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.
Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
#6I 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 .
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.
Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
#7A 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 }
$ 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/
$ open $(pages)
Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
#8Small 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 the…
Which is exactly the point of Gemini.
Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
#9Small 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 the…
It's about capturing the noncommerciality, not the experimentation. Most of the small web sites are just blogs, a solved problem by now, but there's interesting content in many of them.