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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

#111

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

cristoperb wrote: post #65
honeycrispy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone between you and the server can change the content of the page on unencrypted connections. I would love to live in a world where encryption is unnecessary, but unfortunately that world does not exist right now.

You could do signatures/MAC without encryption to guarantee that the message was not modified

Okay! Cool! Let’s just (nonsensically) develop a new protocol for this small group of nerds’ fetish for ‘retro tech’. A protocol that nobody will use.

You do realise that “is it technically possible?” Is like 1% of the question in computing, at most, yes? HTTP and HTTPS are what we’ve got.

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

#112

Post by mattlondon »

krapp wrote: post #101
wibbily wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 restriction…

I think a "markdown-web" that uses some of the Gemini approaches for privacy and auth/identity etc would be pretty nice.

Of course, as others have said, we could just use HTML without JavaScript or cookies and we'd be a lot of the way there with 95% less effort but hey in the future we'll probably just query an AI rather than load a web page ourselves.

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

#113

Post by robgibbons »

sdoering wrote: post #84
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…

This is so lovely. Just adopted it for arch. And set it up, so that I can just type `indy n` (with "n" being any number) and it opens n pages in my browser. Thanks for sharing.

`indy 500`

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

#114

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

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…

Your entire comment is paragraphs of grasping at straws.

> The other thing is the usual argument about oppressive governments, etc... Well, if want to protect yourself, TLS won't save you, you will be given away by your IP address, they may not see exactly what you are looking at, but the simple fact you are connecting to a server containing sensitive data may be evidence enough. Protecting your identity is what networks like TOR are for, and you can hide a plain text server behind the TOR network, which would act as the privacy layer.

A huge ‘citation needed’ for this whole paragraph. Just admit that you don’t care about this use case and move on. Don’t present a contrived and completely justified hypothetical where oppressive governments behave exactly in a way that happens to mean that there’s only room for the technologies that you personally are into.

You’ve completely departed from reality. It’s not 2004 anymore.

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

#115

Post by freediver »

aquova wrote: post #63
freediver wrote: post #33

Kagi Small Web has about 32K sites and I'd like to think that we have captured most of (english speaking) personal blogs out there (we are adding about 10 per day and a significant effort went into discovering/fidning them). It is kind of sad that the entire size of this small web is only 30k sites these days.

What methods are you using to find them? I notice my own doesn't appear, although it does show up well under some (very niche) Google search terms. I suspect there's the potential for an order of magnitude more sites than have been found.

Checking HN every day to see if something interesting surfaces :)

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

#116

Post by mattlondon »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #111
cristoperb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do signatures/MAC without encryption to guarantee that the message was not modified

Okay! Cool! Let’s just (nonsensically) develop a new protocol for this small group of nerds’ fetish for ‘retro tech’. A protocol that nobody will use. You do realise that “is it technically possible?” Is like 1% of the question in computing, at most, yes? HTTP and HTTPS are what we’ve got.

This whole post is about Gemini the protocol, a new protocol for a small group of nerds' fetish for retro tech (it's basically modern gopher).

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

#117

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

627467 wrote: post #72

I read alot against monetization in the comments. I think because we are used monetization being so exploitative, filled with dark patterns and bad incentives on the Big Web. But it doesnt need to be thia way: small web can also be about sustainable monetization. In fact there's a whole page on that on https://indieweb.org/business-models There's nothing wrong with "publishers" aspiring to get paid.

Yep. People have very short memories. I remember that ethical ad network in the late 2000s that all the cool tech bloggers would use.

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

#119

Post by mattlondon »

susam wrote: post #85
zahlman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this concept of "personal blog" include people periodically sharing, say, random knowledge on technical topics? Or is it specifically people writing about their day-to-day lives? How would I check if my site is included?

You can check: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallweb.tx... >. I can see that your RSS URL is listed there. But it currently does not appear in the search results here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/?search=zahlman >. The reason appears to be this: "If the blog is included in small web feed list (which means it has content in English, it is informational/educational by nature and it is not trying to se…

Why would you only include blogs in your small web index? That must be a minute fraction of what is out there?

I can't think of a single blog that I read these days (small or not), yet there are loads of small "old school" sites out there that are still going strong.

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

#120

Post by mattlondon »

shermantanktop wrote: post #17

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…

You need to go more tin-foil-hat

Its not just JavaScript, it's cookies, it's "auto loading" resources (e.g. 1x1 pixels with per-request unique URLs), it's third-party http requests to other domains (which might art cookies too).

I think the XKCD comic about encryption-vs-wrench has never been more apt for Gemini the protocol...

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