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The IndieWeb, Personal Web, Personal Websites true the-small-web The Small Web false false

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

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

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