The Small Web
Referenced by: This Knowledge Hub
Small personal websites created by individuals
- My Personal Website
- A callback to how the web was before social media, which homogenized content
- These pages are diverse and typically won't have ads or marketers
- Comparable to The Cozy Web in that way
The small web as a whole is Freeform
- Individual sites may be Chronological still
- Individual sites link between each other in ways similar to wikis
- These can form Webrings
Browsing the small web
- Follow Webrings or other links from known small websites
- Marginalia is a search engine for non-commercial content with a "random" button and filters for the small web explicitly (amongst other useful filters!)
Building personal websites
IndieWeb contains various resources
- Their building blocks are standards people can use to help the small web connect with each other consistently
- They discourage the use of site builders or templates that end up making sites look too homogenized
Free hosting for static websites:
- Neocities
- Codeberg pages (and any other pages-server instance)
- Like on Incremental Social!
- Github pages
- Weird (in development)
Streams
Microsub is a proposed protocol to support this
- That way, people could use microsub clients to subscribe to multiple streams and get them in one feed
- Effectively a Federated Social Media that works through personal websites
- Announce new posts using WebSub
This also allows your personal website to be the one source of truth for your posted content
- Effectively solves the problems described in Hey Creators, Please Make Firehoses!
Multiple streams can be hosted by one site/person so people can subscribe to the kind of content they're interested in
How viable would it be to include chat messages in a stream as well?
- Perhaps with Chat Glue you could link to specific branches I chatted in
Digital Gardens
These sites may be useful to occasionally check up on rather than get notifications from on every post/change
- Although Garden-RSS could allow those who want to receive notifications to do so
Why people want the small web
There are tools these days that make making websites incredibly easy
- Back in the day geocities was pretty complicated but a lot of people managed to make pages there
- Neocities has an extensive page on Learn How to Make Websites!
Hosting can be expensive, but static websites are cheap
- There are plenty of free options out there for hosting static websites
- Ideally you'd use some sort of system that is easily transferrable to other servers, and possibly even supports nomadic identities
- Free hosting for static websites:
- People are creative and love creating things