Invasive tracking and pay-for-play search engines has broken the internet. It’s time to reclaim our independence with the Small Web.
I’ve recently found the indieweb, from their website:
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.
We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
Check out personalsit.es too - a wonderful collection of small, independent websites curated under the banner of personal websites. A lot of tech people there, but some other little nuggets too.
There’s also the indieweb webring which is a great old-school way to discover more sites on the indie web.
Thanks, those are awesome! I’ll be adding my own site to both
Those are great links. Thanks for posting them! Gonna give them a look.
y’all know that web 2.0 includes things like lemmy, right?
Yeah, from what I remember of what Web 2.0 was, it was services that could be interactive in the browser window, without loading a whole new page each time the user submitted information through HTTP POST. “Ajax” was a hot buzzword among web/tech companies.
Flickr was mind blowing in that you could edit photo captions and titles without navigating away from the page. Gmail could refresh the inbox without reloading the sidebar. Google maps was impressive in that you could drag the map around and zoom within the window, while it fetched the graphical elements necessary on demand.
Or maybe web 2.0 included the ability to implement states in the stateless HTTP protocol. You could log into a page and it would only show you the new/unread items for you personally, rather than showing literally every visitor the exact same thing for the exact same URL.
Social networking became possible with Web 2.0 technologies, but I wouldn’t define Web 2.0 as inherently social. User interactions with a service was the core, and whether the service connected user to user through that service’s design was kinda beside the point.
Link us your website then.
Webrings ftw!!!
I still like MetaFilter and parts of the Something Awful Forums.
I’m not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He’s like “2.0?!? Where have you been? It’s all about web3 and blockchains.” Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?
When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.
Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!
But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.
Was just talking with a coworker about how with the rise of server-side rendering we’re finally technologically back to Web 1.0
Lol we talked about that back when Google implemented dynamic rendering
Right??? Like it’s 1995 all over again.
Well, we’re totally doing this and it’s working quite alright if you ask me.
“We” have been battling giants and absolute war machines for decades and…we’re still here, right? Open source software is running 90% of servers, and driving the innovation faster than ever. It’s supporting their shitty techbros empires and letting them live their wicked dreams just because the anarco-communist principles put freedom as the centermost value of all of this. Isn’t it?
All the while, aren’t we totally enjoying our small web world already? As many of us have pointed in the comments? We won’t cure tiktok adrelin addicted kids by inviting them into a webring. And I don’t think I even want them in before they’re cured anyway. Prohibiting greedy capitalist from poisoning our children isn’t our technological endeavour. We fight back, protect ourselves, and prepare the world after. But it’s a bigger problem than the fediverse, isn’t it?
Anyway, I propose we selfhost a lot of good stuff and get kids addicted to robbing giants, waddaya think? Yar
Honestly the hardest part of doing this seems to be settling on what we’re going to call it. Ironically, it is difficult to search for and discover sites following this philosophy precisely because they are so decentralized and independent and nobody’s even using any common terminology for it. I’ve heard variations of this called Web 1.0, Small Web, Indie Web, Nostalgia Web, Old Web, Retro Web, Analog Web, Free Web, Libre Web, and dozens more terms even more vague and difficult to remember off the top of my head. “Small Web” seems to have the most traction from what I can tell but discovery remains such a hard problem to solve, especially without falling into the same traps that led us here.
To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren’t focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.
Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can’t produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can’t bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won’t have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.
Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it’s going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it’s not financial gain they’re after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it’s to hide something else they’re doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.
The bots and scrapers are most definitely going after anything and everything - I’ve got about 10+ bots trying to scrape my site every day according to my logs. Quite honestly it shocked me considering I do zero SEO and it’s mostly random shit on my site.
There’s stuff being developed - ai robots blocklists, ai tar pits, poisoning the images and other media.
It’s a pita to implement a lot of this however, just for a small personal site.
I imagine a solution could be the same one from Web 1.0: webrings. Find one site on one and you’ve found a lot more interesting, curated ones as well.
Genesis web
I’ve said for years. We need web1.5.
It’s called gopher and you don’t used
At least we have the tildeverse
I’m embarrassed how I forgot about the famous ~
[waves hand]
Call on me!! Call on me!!
Why not just make it 1998 and bring back Web Rings?
Problem solved
Web Rings were freaking awesome. I’ve recently discovered the Small Web tool from Kagi and it’s basically a modern version of a web ring. It’s pretty slick. www.kagi.com/smallweb if you’re interested.
I’ve already seen people bringing back webrings
