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
The future
The Internet is a series of webs talks about transitioning from our current consolidated web back to the indie web
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