21–30 of 263 posts
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 wond…
https://varun.ch (at the bottom of the page)
There's also a couple directories/network graphs https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://eightyeightthirty.one/
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.
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 the…
Which is exactly the point of Gemini.
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.
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 . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, w…
Regarding the financials, even though the second nlnet grant runs out in a few weeks, I've got enough of a war chest to work full time probably a good bit into 2029 (modulo additional inflation shocks). The operational bit is self-funding now, and it's relatively low maintenance, so if worse comes to worst I'll have to get a job (if jobs still exist in 2029, otherwise I guess I'll live in the shameful cardboard box of those who were NGMI ;-).
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 . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, w…
I think that's a cool project, though I found the results to be less relevant than Google.
If Google is ranking small web results better than Marginalia, that’s actionable.
If the best result isn’t in the index and it should be, that’s actionable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's a cool project, though I found the results to be less relevant than Google.
Whether the results are less relevant or not depends massively on what you searched and whether the best results even exist in the Marginalia search index or not. If Google is ranking small web results better than Marginalia, that’s actionable. If the best result isn’t in the index and it should be, that’s actionable.
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.