pages/site/garden/the-small-web/index.md
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The IndieWeb, Personal Web, Personal Websites, IndieWeb true the-small-web The Small Web false false

The Small Web

437 words, ~2 minute read.


Referenced by: /now, 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

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

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:

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

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

The web has lost its soul

You should check out the indie web