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The “small web” is bigger than you might think

kevinboone.me

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Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#101

Post by krapp »

wibbily wrote: post #98
mattlondon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

It’s tough but one of the tenets of Gemini is that a lone programmer can write their own client in a spirited afternoon/weekend. Markdown is just a little too hard to clear the bar. Already there was much bellyaching on the mailing list about forcing dependence on SSL libraries; suggesting people rely on more libraries would have been a non-starter Note that the Gemini protocol is just a way of moving bytes around; n…

Didn't the creator of the protocol go on a rant when someone made a browser for Gemini that included a favicon?

I can't imagine the backlash if someone tried to normalize Markdown. Isn't the entire point of Gemini that it can never be extended or expanded upon?

Maybe it would be better to create an entirely different protocol/alt web around Markdown that didn't risk running afoul of Gemini's philosophical restrictions?

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#102

Post by ZebrasEat »

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?

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#104

Post by krapp »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #50
cdrnsf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an element of nostalgia, certainly but it's also a reaction to the overwhelmingly commercial web. Why not build something instead of scrolling through brief videos interspersed with more and more ads that follow you everywhere? Large companies have helped build the web but they've done at least as much, if not more, to help kill it.

The small web can be a lot of things, but IMO it gets too overrun by the ideologically zealous. One does not have to believe in primitive anarchism to enjoy camping, for example. In general it seems any niche idea on the internet is like candle flame to zealous moths.

Ideological zealots are more or less the only people who hate the modern web so much that they want to quarantine themselves within an entirely different and functionally limited protocol or ecosystem. Everyone else is fine discussing camping in Facebook groups and on Reddit and wherever, maybe just using an ad blocker.

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#105

Post by esseph »

ZebrasEat wrote: post #102

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?

Parts of the "dark web" are built somewhat like this

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#107

Post by [deleted] »

oooyay wrote: post #53
susam wrote: post #7

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#108

Post by est »

8organicbits wrote: post #16

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.

also kagi exclude non-English sites. Sad for mixed language blogs like mine.

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#109

Post by pipeline_peak »

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

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#110

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

jimbokun wrote: post #100
GuB-42 wrote: post #44

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, ac…

I think a simpler argument would be that small web is not a good fit if your content is sensitive in the place you are publishing from. It’s meant for public publishing. If you need encryption, use a different distribution mechanism.

That is not the only protection that HTTPS offers. US ISPs used to inject ads into HTML HTTP responses.

Can all this performative love for unencrypted HTTP just die already. You’ve all forgotten what it was actually like, and what the drawbacks actually are. This is so tiring.

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