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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

#81

Post by danhite »

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 ~ single page (most days)

if you wish to serve that as noscript it would suffice to partition in/visible content eg by <section class="keywords ..." and let the user apply css (or script by extension or bookmarklet/s) to reveal just their locally known interests

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

#82

Post by jopsen »

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.

> I'd like to think that we have captured most of (english speaking) personal blogs

I think that's naive.

But maybe thats just because my blog wasn't on the list :)

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

#83

Post by nottorp »

lich_king wrote: post #24

It's easy to hand-curate a list of 5,000 "small web" URLs. The problem is scaling. For example, Kagi has a hand-curated "small web" filter, but I never use it because far more interesting and relevant "small web" websites are outside the filter than in it. The same is true for most other lists curated by individual folks. They're neat, but also sort of useless because they are too small: 95% of the things you're look…

> The question is how do you take it to a million?

Do you need to take it to a million in the same place? Is that still "small"?

Why not have 2000 hand curated directories instead?

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

#84

Post by sdoering »

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.

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

#85

Post by susam »

zahlman wrote: post #75
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.

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 sell anything) we check for these two things to show it on the site: • Blog has recent posts (

(Source: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb#criteria-for-posts-to...)

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

#86

Post by marginalia_nu »

jopsen wrote: post #80
marginalia_nu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big thing that made encryption required is arguably that ISPs started injecting crap into webpages. Governments can still track you with little issue since SNI is unencrypted. It's also very likely that Cloudflare and the like are sharing what they see as they MITM 80% of your connections.

> It's also very likely that Cloudflare and the like are sharing what they see as they MITM 80% of your connections. Maybe, I suspect not, but even so if we reduce the number of men in the middle that's pretty nice.

Between what Snowden told us, and the CLOUD Act, it seems quite likely.

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

#87

Post by xantronix »

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 have noticed that when I encounter an HTTP-only web site, I know I am in for a pleasant, calm, well-curated experience, and I mean that without a hint of irony.

I don't have a lot to say about the technical discussion here, other than "TLS null cipher could be fine but also a lot more infrastructure than desirable", which could subvert your intent here.

Maybe we should normalise TOR usage before it becomes a surefire signal to the FBI to raid one's home.

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

#89

Post by skciva »

101008 wrote: post #36
varun_ch wrote: post #22

A fun trend on the "small web" is the use of 88x31 badges that link to friends websites or in webrings. I have a few on my website, and you can browse a ton of small web websites that way. https://varun.ch (at the bottom of the page) There's also a couple directories/network graphs https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://eightyeightthirty.one/

A beautiful trend that has been going for 30 years ;-) One of the happiest moments of my childhood (I'm exagerating) was when my button was placed in that website that I loved to visit everyday. It was one of the best validations I ever received :)

What inspired me to pursue computer related fields was making little badges and forum signatures in Photoshop as a teen. Heartwarming to see this tradition has persisted

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

#90

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

> If you want to make a tiny web server, like on a microcontroller, encryption is the hardest part

Even an esp32 can (just) handle TLS. Given relatively modern designs, you end up on remarkably small chips before TLS is a real blocker

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