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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

#171

Post by gzread »

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…

Yeah, instead someone makes a new and incompatible protocol whenever they want to change it.

> The SmolNet consists of content available through alternative protocols outside the web such as gemini:// gopher:// Gopher+ gophers:// finger:// spartan:// text:// SuperText nex:// scorpion:// mercury:// titan:// guppy:// scroll:// molerat:// terse:// fsp://. There is a summary of the main SmolNet protocols.

- https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/SmolNet

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

#172

Post by chrneu »

pixodaros wrote: post #132
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.

One of the many things I disagree with Scott Alexander on is that to me, frequent blog updates signal poor quality not excellent writing. Its hard to come up with an independent, evidence-based opinion on something worth sharing every week, but easy to post about what you read lots of angry or scary posts about. People who post a lot also tend to have trouble finding useful things to do in their offline life. It is v…

I have a "frequent post" section of my blog and a "deeper" section. Unless you're interested in the frequent posts they aren't in your face on my blog. It's kind of a best of both worlds type thing.

The frequent posts also let me quickly try out new methods of telling stories or presenting information or new techniques. I think this tends to speed up how often I post larger effort things cuz I can practice skills with frequent posts.

A good comparison would be a youtuber with a patreon. The youtube gets the produced media, whereas the patreon gets "cell phone in the moment" updates.

but i totally agree that when folks are finding things to post about that can be problematic and annoying.

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

#173

Post by danhite »

8organicbits wrote: post #148
danhite wrote: post #81

Isn't this a simple compute opportunity? ... > March 15 there were 1,251 updates [from feed of small websites ...] too active, to publish all the updates on a single page, even for just one day. Well, I could publish them, but nobody has time to read them all. if the reader accumulates a small set of whitelist keywords, perhaps selected via optionally generating a tag cloud ui, then that est. 1,251 likely drops to ~…

The tag cloud part may be a challenge. Web feeds don't always tag their content. I have a blog filter that does something similar ( https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/ ), but the UI I ended up with isn't great and too many things are uncategorized.

Kudos on your site effort and I immediately see your point.

In fact I took your topmost entry with no helpful site/update tags and dove in a little to try to understand why a RSS friendly blogger might not be passing along ~ tags for better reader discovery.

Turns out my scarce info test case blogger has a mastodon that immediately lists all these tags about himself [I've stripped it down] ...

#FrontEnd Developer #CSS #Halifax #London #Singapore Technical writer and rabbit-hole deep-diver Former Organiser for https://londonwebstandards.org & https://stateofthebrowser.com Interests: #Bushcraft #Outdoors #DnD #Fantasy #SciFi #HipHop #CSS #Eleventy #IndieWeb #OpenSource #OpenWeb

I conclude if he knew such site and post tags getting to RSS would be of use, he'd probably make the tiny effort to wire the descriptions.

Nonetheless I merely crawled links for a minute to found this info, so I imagine something like the free tier of the Cloudflare crawling api might suffice over time for a simplistic automated fix to hint decorate blog sites.

I mean, given that we're not trying to recreate pagerank, but just trying to tip the balance in favor of desirable initial discovery.

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

#174

Post by userbinator »

pixodaros wrote: post #132
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.

One of the many things I disagree with Scott Alexander on is that to me, frequent blog updates signal poor quality not excellent writing. Its hard to come up with an independent, evidence-based opinion on something worth sharing every week, but easy to post about what you read lots of angry or scary posts about. People who post a lot also tend to have trouble finding useful things to do in their offline life. It is v…

[dead]

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

#175

Post by eichin »

flir wrote: post #64
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.

Suspect there's a long tail/iceberg you still haven't captured (source: you haven't found me yet and I'm not hiding, I'm just not chasing SEO).

Same - but mine are also primarily so I can hand out links to specific articles - they're not hidden but they're not advertised either (and they're static sites with almost zero logging, so I wouldn't really notice either except that this site has a published list :-)

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

#176

Post by einr »

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've been thinking the same thing for years -- thank you for saying it. I agree completely.

Another pro is that no encryption means super low power microcontrollers and retrocomputers can browse freely. The system req's go down by orders of magnitude. I think enforcing TLS in the Gemini protocol was a huge mistake; there are so many retrocomputing enthusiasts that would love to browse Geminispace on their Amigas and 486s -- it might actually have been a significant part of the userbase -- but they're locked out because their CPUs simply cannot reasonably handle modern TLS.

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

#177

Post by famahar »

freediver wrote: post #115
aquova wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I noticed that Kagi Small Web tends to lean towards more tech focused blogs. So it feels more like you've captured that subset of the small web, especially if your main source is hackernews.

Not sure if you've used this as a source too but there's a lot of tiny personal sites in this directory too. https://melonland.net/surf-club

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

#180

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

Gunax wrote: post #94

It's sad how the snall web became invisible. I used to use all sorts of small websites in 2005. But by 2015 I used only about 10 large ones. Like many changes, I cannot pinpoint exactly when this happened. It just occurred to me someday that I do not run into many unusual websites any longer. It's unfortunate that so much of our behavior is dictated by Google. I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at s…

>I dint think it's malicious or even intentional...

it's indirectly intentional in that Google isn't wringing it's hands trying to destroy tiny blogs but they (Google) have deliberately chosen to ignore anything that doesn't play the SEO game, whatever the driver of that game is.

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