
What Is the Small Web? - tbassetto
https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
======
imgabe
I'm generally on board with the sentiment, but some of this rhetoric is a bit
much, even for me.

> The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug
> dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit.

Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before
the web.

~~~
tokai
I have never met or heard of a drug dealer calling their customers for users.

Even if that was the case, is "(drug) user" a nice term compared to what else
is used - like addicts, fiends, junkie, tweaker, etc. It kind of recognize the
agency of addicts, instead of the dehumanisation following the other terms.

~~~
kgraves
The 'addicting' aspect of what the tech companies have created and the
behaviours they are willing to go to get their 'users' hooked is why the
'user' comparison to 'drug users' makes sense.

~~~
tokai
No it really doesn't. Are library users called users because the library preys
of their patrons addiction to literature? This is a very weak wordgame, that
at best muddies the point about tech companies.

~~~
kgraves
There are multiple instances of tech companies exhibiting this 'drug user'
behaviour on their customers, I am sure you don't have any examples for your
false comparison.

~~~
tokai
You are not understanding the issue here. Nobody is saying that tech companies
ain't doing bad things. Let's stop this argument, as we're are not having the
same argument.

~~~
kgraves
OK, So you have no examples then. Good.

~~~
tokai
Simmer down Kyle, and work on your reading comprehension.

~~~
kgraves
Try to work on that false comparison of yours and come up with a better
counter argument, you know you don't have any examples with your previous one.

------
torgian
I’m not sure if I’m 100% sold on this. The service sounds like ( in their own
terms ) “Big WEB” but the in a server that is... “owned”? By the user renting
that server.

Honestly it just sounds like every other server farm out there. Rent a server,
put your data on it, hope the service doesn’t go down and trust that the
company isn’t selling your data behind your back.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea they propose. But mechanically, it seems
to work like any other place.

Want to convince me? Make a service where I can rent my own server ( not just
a portion of it ) and physically own it. Nobody, not even the provider, can
access it without my explicit permission in written form ( email with digital
signatures ).

Until then, this “Small Web” service just sounds like every other server
provider out there.

~~~
m0xte
I think it’s simpler. This smells like a load of marketing to justify the
existence of another silo which is controlled by some form of vanity ideology.

Nope.

We still have plenty of choices which don’t need an ideology shipped with it.
I’m good with a text editor, an open source OS and a VPS, colo or some hooky
box under my desk hanging off my ADSL line. That’s the small web that isn’t
consumed by some portalisation which is really the issue isn’t it which is not
being solved here by trying to create another one?

~~~
lvturner
Agreed, my 'Small Web' is a couple of Raspberry Pi plugged in to my router
exposing services that are useful to me - the more I use it and the more tech
news I read, the more I want to expand both the robustness and diversity of my
personal services.

~~~
bergstromm466
Have you written about that somewhere? What kinds of services do you run
yourself?

~~~
lvturner
I'm afraid not - it's nothing particularly exotic, mostly Home Assistant, Pi
Hole and Bitwarden password manager.

Next thing I want to add is a bookmark manager - then perhaps some kind of
storage solution.

------
john___matrix
This is the same guy who ran that complete shambles of a vapourware project a
few years back to build a smartphone right?

This sounds exactly the same in that it's some vanity project under the guise
of being indie or privacy focused but all he's really looking for is some more
cash.

I'd probably continue to steer well clear.

~~~
pixxel
Yes steer well clear of this guy. I can’t remember the details as it was long
ago but I distinctly remember him being lambasted by the design/dev community.

EDIT: Not to leave HN readers hanging and to back up my comment...

He raised $100,000 on Kickstarter back in 2014 to build a "privacy" focused
phone. One month later he took the phone off the table due to "lack of
resources". Needless to say the phone never materialised.

[https://gigaom.com/2015/01/13/ind-ie-scales-back-focuses-
on-...](https://gigaom.com/2015/01/13/ind-ie-scales-back-focuses-on-heartbeat-
social-networking-client/)

~~~
rvz
Even Heartbeat was a stunning failure. I had high hopes for this guy but he
had a contradictory exception towards accepting Apple and their stance on
'privacy' at the time.

Both him and his wife are all in on this utopian small-web privacy idea and
they detest attending conferences with FAANMG sponsorship. However, his wife
recently attended a design conference sponsored by Facebook, Twitter and
Google. [0]

He'll probably instantly block you if you brought this up or spin the story.

[0] [https://www.framer.com/loupe/2019/](https://www.framer.com/loupe/2019/)

------
rglullis
Appropriate all the good values and ideas from
[https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/), re-heat it add some feel-good
word salad and we have this "Small Web".

Yes, by all means let's get back to a more decentralized and distributed web.
But providing a service where you are still hosting your site on someone
else's servers and on someone else's domain and calling for values is just
digital green-washing.

~~~
detaro
... and forget to mention Indieweb. Another all-in-one solution compatible
with Indieweb and Fediverse tech, with _optional_ hosting as a service, would
be a great project to that goal, and an addition to the ecosystems. But no,
has to be its own thing.

~~~
kgraves
This 'indieweb' was sponsored by Google, hardly going to be in line with the
goals of Aral's 'Small Web'.

~~~
detaro
It makes no sense to turn this into a purity contest. "a company once provided
a room for an event", "they provide service credits for all open-source
projects that apply" or something like that does not invalidate a movement. In
the same way that I don't support going through the sponsor lists of the
events Aral talks at to call him a hypocrite - as long as it is peripheral
it's sometimes hard to avoid and sometimes very useful support you can grab
without any commitments.

~~~
kgraves
If this was a mistake and they have changed their mind, sure. If not, (even
when warned) it shows they don't have any principles, You won't catch Richard
Stallman or anyone rightfully for privacy rights at such an event would you?

I would definitely be suspect and would actively call out privacy conferences
being hosted and invited by surveillance capitalists.

~~~
rglullis
Quick, let's drop every open source project that had any kind of contribution
from Google because _every thing done by a trillion-dollar company does is
evil and mere relationship with them implies you are compromised._

~~~
kgraves
Who said drop them?

------
okaleniuk
I guess, my [https://wordsandbuttons.online/](https://wordsandbuttons.online/)
qualifies as a small web site. However, it was built in a very contradictory
manner. I would like to challenge this: "It must be done in a manner that does
not require any technical know-how whatsoever".

It doesn't take too much technical know-how to build a site. Basic HTML+CSS+JS
is enough really. Writing, editing, visual design, UI design, - it all
requires way too much expertise in comparison. You have to be a creative let's
say 80% of the time and technical for about 20%. Reducing the last 20% only
wins you 20% of the effort. But! by concentrating the technical expertise in
your own head you get another level of freedom as a creative person too.

I was writing on Livejournal, habrahabr, Codrspace, and Medium before I went
stand-alone. And the main reason was not ideological but rather practical. I
wanted to make interactive illustrations, quizzes, and puzzles for my pages. I
wanted very specific very custom things no platform would provide.

And that's why I went small web. Small web but full tech. I enjoy my creative
freedom by employing let it be modest technical expertise but exactly in a way
I want to employ it. And I think, investing into technical skills to get
creative freedom is well worth it.

------
fierarul
Coining up a new catchy term while simultaneously trying to sell your new and
shiny thing rings all kind of alarm bells.

At least their software is "non-colonial" which is the 1st time I've seen this
term applied to software.

Software has never been cheaper and easier to use. If anybody wants to put the
smallest amount of effort they can do all this stuff.

Maybe people are smarter and know the Internet is a Dark Forest and maybe
staying off it or within the confines of big forstresses is not such a bad
idea.

~~~
kgraves
What are they 'selling'?

~~~
fierarul
Reading the article would clarify that.

------
adminu
Jeez, either they are high, or I am! What an unsubstantiated load claims.

> You hear a lot of talk about blockchains and proof of work but this is not
> what the Small Web is about. Having a billion copies of the same database is
> not decentralisation. That’s centralisation. If you have a billion people
> having [...] unique databases is decentralisation.

Really? This ignores the hard learned facts that, despite the claim that "on
the Small Web, we distrust servers and trust clients", clients in reality can
be malicious. Sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya does not prevent from
attackers. Best case is, it slows them down, because they have to shake off
the laughter first.

> Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from
> Big Tech and the Big Web.

Well, that is obviously not true! The foundation of the web stems from
military and academic origins. The open source movement is strong, Linux is
the most used OS for servers. The list goes on.

The list of claims on could debunk is too long for my cup of coffee!

If that's what they refer to as vision, then count me out. I must be miles
away from that level of "enlightenment"!

Just to make clear: I am all for people hosting there blogs and webpages
themselves. Medium is awful, blogger does not even load with the browser
plugins that I use. I am all for distrusting servers, using uBlock Origin,
uMatrix, a big hosts file and your brain are good first steps. But I also am
all for distrusting the client. What I can't stand is blog posts like these,
throwing around half-truths, claims, and unreflected ideology for the purpose
of money (they want donations) and publicity (they want donations). \s

~~~
kgraves
> Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from
> Big Tech and the Big Web.

> Well, that is obviously not true!

While I don't agree with the absolutist _all_ , he's talking about the
_majority_ :

\+ Tensorflow (Google)

\+ Chrome Dev Tools (Google)

\+ Pytorch (Facebook)

\+ Kubernetes (Google)

\+ Flutter (Google)

\+ Xcode (Apple)

\+ Visual Studio Code (Microsoft)

\+ React (Facebook)

\+ Angular

\+ And so on.

All have room for embedding analytics and spying on it's 'users'.

------
arexxbifs
Here are my suggestions for keeping the "small web" of the 90:s alive:

* If self-hosting on a server in your home isn't feasible, find a reputable mom-n-pop web hotel and support them with your money.

* Focus on making your site as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, regardless of where in the world they are and what hardware they're on. Don't use javascript and databases where static HTML will suffice.

* Don't skimp on links to other "small web" pages.

------
Santosh83
In the era of 5G, massive storage and incredibly powerful CPUs, we really
should be exploring the home server space, as it has scope for huge
improvements in terms of enabling non-technical people to own their data and
operate 'servers'. This would actually realise the dream of a distributed
network of full-fledged peers and also put tremendous power in the hands of
ordinary people.

~~~
input_sh
You're assuming that ISPs are okay with you hosting a public service using
their infrastructure, which they're historically very much opposed to (in
order to get you to pay for a more expensive "business" account).

~~~
m0xte
Mine doesn’t give a crap if my outbound is 200 gig a month uploading stuff to
onedrive or iCloud. Why should it have that opinion on anything else? I’m
paying for a pipe. The only control metric they have is asymmetry and that’s a
technology tradeoff in my case (ADSL)

~~~
input_sh
Oh I completely agree with you that they _shouldn 't_ care, but the odds are
big that you'll find out that they do in your Terms of Service.

------
open-source-ux
It's not clear what this "Small Web" gives users instead of simply running a
WordPress installation on a VPS or a shared hosting plan. In fact, the "Small
Web" command line installation instructions on the accompanying site.js
website are considerably more complicated that the easy one-click installation
process widely available for WordPress. This suggests the "Small Web" will
appeal only to technically savvy users rather than appeal to a wider audience.

WordPress, regardless of whether you like it or not, gives you an easy GUI for
editing your website and a wide choice of plug-ins and themes. The "Small Web"
with it's accompanying site.js website ("small web construction set") is more
complicated and appears to offer less but dressed up in language to make it
sound new and unique.

~~~
kgraves
This is possibly the only criticism I have with Site.js, but I do wish Aral
can build around a GUI for his command line tool.

But agreed, something like Ghost or Wordpress looks and is more easier than
Site.js

------
m-i-l
Also "Rediscovering the Small Web":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326329](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326329)

------
scandox
Whenever I have an idea where the goal is to decentralize and yet somehow I
want the achievement of that goal to coalesce around myself then it's time to
ask the question: is this not simply centralized on ego instead of a platform?

I think one of the greatest problems with achieving decentralized anything is
that the egos that might make it happen cannot be satisfied because a really
decentralized system should refuse to coalesce around any individual
component, person or platform.

------
fossuser
I think this is a good idea and I think making it easy for people to host
their own services is valuable. [0]

It’s also been tried a few times with little success (sandstorm.io).

I think the problem is deeper, modern infrastructure is messy to run, it’s
hard to configure, and every thing has to be specifically tweaked to work.
Something that works for regular users will require extensive tooling to be
useful and will need that tooling for every application and use case.

I think Urbit is probably the best long term bet (old blog post, but gets the
idea across): [https://urbit.org/blog/magic/](https://urbit.org/blog/magic/)

A more recent one: [https://urbit.org/understanding-
urbit/](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/)

Urbit abstracts away the p2p complexity so in the future users can used
decentralized applications built on the platform without having to even know
they’re decentralized. I think this is the only way this kind of thing can
work at scale for regular users.

[0]: [https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-
facebook...](https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-
facebook.html)

~~~
ForHackernews
Oh god no. Urbit is not less complex or easier. It's piling on all kinds of
extra superfluous nonsense in service of an ideological project, not for
technical reasons.

~~~
ISaIF73
Urbit stack is ~30k lines of code, that's low enough to be grasped by a single
person. What's hard is learning form scratch completely new platform, but
that's deliberate and is not such a problem if it manages to deliver what it
promises.

Somehow I feel that accusations of being ideological come from people, who
themselves are ideologically oposed to Yarvins work and fail to consider
Urbits network protocol purely for its properties. Idea of giving network
addresses value, cryptographic ownership and creating a hierarchy of addresses
resembling functionality on the network (users, ISPs, etc.) seems perfectly
resonable.

~~~
ForHackernews
From the last time this came up on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156)

> the core of the whole system (the Nock language) has "loobeans" instead of
> booleans in which 1 represents false and 0 represents true at which point I
> nope'd out pretty hard.

>> Being contrarian is not the same as being clever, and this is very much not
clever.

~~~
fossuser
Yeah, no disagreement from me there. That bit is dumb and he admitted it was a
mistake to do that.

It doesn’t mean that everything is bad.

I was skeptical initially too, but was curious enough to check it out. I was
surprised when I did.

It's a small community and product is still in pre-widespread adoption stage
(though far enough along to be useful for people to play with):
[https://urbit.org/understanding-
urbit/roadmap/](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/)

My quick overview here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397725)

~~~
fossuser
Also (not excusing the bad design) 0 is often the success error code in Unix
for the shell and 1 or something else is often error.

So it’s not entirely without precedent, but it’s still an unnecessary and
confusing inversion for true and false.

------
dna_polymerase
> Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from
> Big Tech and the Big Web. They are optimised for creating Big Tech and the
> Big Web.

What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody forces you to host your personal
website on a k8s cluster.

> While we can repurpose some of them for our own uses, we also need tools
> specifically optimised for building single-tenant web applications and the
> Small Web.

How about Apache for local testing and a ftp server to a webspace at [INSERT
WEBHOSTING COMPANY HERE]. Existed for decades, well tested and easy to use.

~~~
kgraves
> What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody forces you to host your personal
> website on a k8s cluster.

But he _is_ right, almost all the dev tools we used are by surveillance
capitalists only further entrenching our reliance on them, think React,
Pytorch, React Native, or even K8S etc.

These tools only benefit the the big tech companies and we are going down a
path of no return.

> How about Apache for local testing and a ftp server to a webspace at [INSERT
> WEBHOSTING COMPANY HERE]. Existed for decades, well tested and easy to use.

This is way too technical for most people, Aral is building something
_everyone_ can use in a few steps and has privacy built in.

~~~
dna_polymerase
> But he is right, almost all the dev tools we used are by surveillance
> capitalists only further entrenching our reliance on them, think React,
> Pytorch, React Native, or even K8S etc.

What? The source of all these things is open. I do not rely on any of these
companies when using these tools now. Of course if I use them in conjunction
with their cloud services I am dependent on say Amazon or Google. But the open
nature of their software provides me with everything I need to use it without
the dependence on said companies. Your critique is mostly blind, unbalanced
tribalism.

> These tools only benefit the the big tech companies and we are going down a
> path of no return.

No they are free to everyone. You could use them for whatever you like.

> This is way too technical for most people, Aral is building something
> everyone can use in a few steps and has privacy built in.

Frankly, if you are unable to use FTP and XAMPP I don't see you using npm and
the CLI.

~~~
kgraves
I've seen so many tools made by these companies which were advertised as
'free' turn towards a cloud based model, deprecated, restricted by a patent
clause or the ecosystem and development is beholden to a single corporation.

The cloud services is just the start.

------
simonjgreen
Had me right up until the advertising.

But let's focus on the first chunk shall we? Yes, wholeheartedly agree. Host
it yourself if you can, host it with a small ISP if you can't. It's necessary
to keep the open Internet alive and prevent us falling back in to the walled
gardens of compuserve, AOL, etc. We're almost there already with our reliance
on Google Search driving caged "standards" like AMP.

~~~
Thuku9tu
Same here, I was quite interested in the first part. That being said, it was
already annoying me because it felt like it was just about choosing A (big
tech) or B (self hosted) which were basically the same thing, but for some
reason people choose A. It's not the same thing, people choose A because most
of them are not skilled enough to get B.

And that's probably a mistake to not make it crystal clear - at the same time
that we make crystal clear that yes, anybody can acquire those skills. Most
people learn to drive a car. This is incredibly difficult! They learn to read
and write, some can even do it in several languages! Why should they not be
able to learn to write html and upload it?

If we make people think freedom and democracy should come cheap and
convenient, we'll just fall into the same trap with some entities building
cheap and easy things and getting control over everyone.

------
ivanhoe
My problem with all these similar privacy-oriented services is that they're
basically saying: "Don't trust others, trust us". And, OK, Aral Balkan is a
well-known figure so I probably would trust him on a word, but I'd much more
prefer to have a way to truly, physically have a full control of the sites and
the data. I can do that now by having a server under my desk, but most of
people can't. For that to become available to the wider public we'll need
something more innovative than just updating EULA on 3rd party hosting
services to be more privacy friendly. Not that it's bad, it's better than
nothing, but I'd really like if we could move the focus more into the
direction of p2p web or coming up with something new, even better.

------
fauigerzigerk
_> Another fundamental difference between the Big Web and Small Web is that on
the Big Web we trust servers and distrust clients whereas on the Small Web, we
distrust servers and trust clients._

I'm less and less sure about that. Clients are increasingly becoming prisons
run and owned by BigCorps, iOS being an extreme example of that. Taking
ownership is fittingly called jailbreaking.

I think the whole client/server distinction isn't that useful. The important
question is who controls what.

The granularity of delegating power is crucial, because completely opting out
of BigCorp offerings is something only tech experts can do.

Consumers need to be able to mix and match, and not have everything follow
from some initial choice they get to make once every few years at best.

------
dusted
I'm entirely for "the small web" but we should be aware that it's difficult to
be as energy efficient when running single-tenant servers than a megacorp for
whom every penny saved per user results in millions of dollars in savings.

Ah, I've read further, and there comes the sales pitch, they're building
something.. Thing is, everyone can go out today, buy a raspberry pi and get a
server online in a few hours.. I don't think this is a problem that should be
solved with MORE tools, I think it is one that should be solved with less
tools.

A pi, nginx and a text editor is really all you need to make a nice home for
yourself on the web.

------
snird
I'm all in for the small web. I have my own personal site for my content[0].
But the writer misses the huge point for the "big web": network. It is hard or
even impossible to get traction for the small web. But posting on facebook?
huge traction.

But it goes for anything really. Writing a technical blog? post on Medium or
on dev.to or whatever is hyped right now to get traction.

This is the real problem here.

[0] [https://snir.dev](https://snir.dev)

------
ai_ja_nai
Privacy and freedom of speech are threatened by INFRASTRUCTURE, not domains or
tools. You can lose your freedom of speech because your hosting or your
DNS/CDN provider terminates you (CloudFlare anyone?). That is the big web he
is referring to. But I fail to see how his technological response addresses
his concerns: TheSmallWeb offers no way to replace the current hosting
mechanism, which is the single source of threat your website can currently
suffer.

------
thinkloop
Would a "small web" require giving up search, recommendation engines, upvotes,
etc. Doesn't something like hn necessarily require centralization?

~~~
rabidrat
I think HN is still small web. It's custom-written by one or a few people,
doesn't make money, isn't trying to take over the world.

~~~
spyke112
Uhm... It's run by Y Combinator. I wouldn't call that, not making money and
not trying to take over the world, on the contrary. Traditional seed vc money
firm.

------
hirako2000
A true small Web would need to drop the isp provider since they can take down
access on a simple take down notice. And run the server yourself.

So, antenna hooked up so that anyone in its perimeter can network. Then
whoever can catch the signal may forward/repeat it, extending this small Web.

Afaik long range signals are highly regulated. There is no small Web possible
yet.

------
lxe
Hey that's cool you're trying to bring back the "homepage". Don't go overboard
with the vision and just execute on what we all know already makes sense.

------
pastapliiats
Neocities, tilde.club?

~~~
SuperPaintMan
cosmic.voyage!

------
meerita
I practice small web since 1998.

------
kgraves
Aral is in this for the long term and I respect his principles. Those accusing
him of his past 'failed' endeavours are part of the problem. He is self
funding his goals and has been ever since, not taking money from surveillance
and vulture capitalists.

He was critical on Mozilla taking money from Google, and calls out privacy
conferences taking money from Google, Facebook and Palantir.

Aral is following in the very footsteps of another respected privacy advocate,
Richard Stallman.

Please take the time to read (or even donate [0]) to the Small Technology
Foundation [1]

[0] [https://small-tech.org/fund-us/](https://small-tech.org/fund-us/)

[1] [https://small-tech.org](https://small-tech.org)

------
bencollier49
MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_REQUIRED_TLS_FEATURE_MISSING ?

------
bit33
I agree with the sentiment of the writer. Unfortunately I don't see much of a
solution offered in the statement.

The biggest obstacle is not only eas of use. Companies as FB, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Google etc solve also other problems, they also select and filter
information for you. They don't do it flawlessly, but still do quit a good
job. One so far nobody else offers, because they are first movers in the space
and now own the biggest networks.

Unfortunately their big centralized systems also creates the danger that comes
with any big centralized source of information. There are always people that
want it to put to good use for noble goals. And as it the human condition all
power corrupts.

So in my opinion it is never good to concentrate too much power in the hands
of too few people. It does not really matter if it is big government or big
business. It will always start working for conformity and limit free speech.

We already see this totalitarian nature in the censorship around Covid
information. It started as a way to surpress legitimate misinformation. But it
is now actually preventing and surpressing new research that challanges
current medical dogmas. Big tech, is like big government. It just does not
work that well, is risk averse and is favouring stability over inovation.

The question then is, how can we revitalize the old decentralized web ideal,
with all it's free information published for all individuals? The old web only
solved standardization of content with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It did not
solve relationships and privacy between people.

Now has the time come to work on standards that connect people. To build
networks of friends and to build trust networks like all social media now
already does.

Technology is also still improving. While all people can't type more stories,
they only have each aimited amount of time for doing that, computers keep
getting faster and faster, storage is keep getting cheaper and cheaper. So
computer power is becoming a commodity with less and less value. Every day, it
gets easier and cheaper to host data and search it.

Web space is cheap, so take Twitter, is it really that hard to publish a
Twitter feed in a JSON file, use encryption to allow friends access to your
feed data and publish that all on your own rented space that you fully
control? Is it that hard to rank your own friends tweets in your own feed that
runs on your rented computer power?

Advertisment as financing the computer rent is an option as well. Third
parties can build services on top of the standardized data sets. Except that
they can not lock you in, as it is your data. They just unlock it by providing
search and filtering services while also include ads to make some bucks.

This open technology could also benefit existing alternative social networks,
because it creates the needed network effect they need. Because by letting
smaller parties work together without even knowing or agreeing with each
other. Nobody controlls the network as everybody owns his own dataset. But can
still connect to all other people who use the same data standard.

What is keeping us from building something like this? What am I missing?

------
aral
Hey all,

Just skimmed the comments (I know, I know, never read the comments) but here
are couple of facts in case you care about that sort of thing (but please
don’t let these get in the way of a lively discussion) ;)

    
    
      - re: drug dealers/users, see: analogy
    
      - Yes, six years ago, we thought we could fix the problem with a phone. Then we started working on the problem and realised we couldn’t possibly raise enough money to do so, then we did a crowdfunding campaign that never included the phone (we promised the alpha of an initial peer-to-peer Mac-based social networking client and promised to keep working on the problem, both of which we delivered on). Also, anyone who asked for a refund from the crowdfunding for any reason got one. If I could do it again, we wouldn’t have held the crowdfunding and I wouldn’t have started on Mac. But this was all part of the process of us learning about the problem.
    
      - It wasn’t on Kick Starter, we built our own crowdfunding system because I wasn’t happy with how Kick Starter, etc., were gathering data (we didn’t want your privacy violated for trying to support us)
    
      - Since then, I’ve sold the three family homes we had (apartments in Turkey, total worth about ~€200,000 or so) and we’ve kept working on the same problem for the past six/seven years with the the initial crowdfunding + those funds + sales of our tracker blocker (Better Blocker) on Mac/iOS + professional speaking fees when we speak at conferences, etc. + donations to our not-for-profit (which basically pay our hosting fees every month).
    
      - Unless IndieWeb is suddenly about building single-tenant web nodes as part of a peer-to-peer future / topologically decentralised Web for everyday people, I don’t see how it’s the same as Small Web. If that is what they’re about now, then sure but, last I checked, they thought we were deranged zealots for publicly calling out Google, Facebook, etc., for being surveillance capitalists. 
    
      - Re: not having done anything since: we created Better Blocker, I personally spoke at over 50 events to raise awareness of the issue, including three times at the European Parliament, I spearheaded the creation of progressive tech policy at one of Europe’s most progressive political movements, and we worked with the City of Ghent on evolving what is now Site.js and the Small Web initiative.
    
      - Finally, someone mentioned that some “privacy projects” say “Don't trust others, trust us.” If anyone tells you that, don’t trust them. We know how to, can, should be (and are) building technology where you don’t have to trust us.
    

Also, PS:

Small Web is not about having your own Static Web page or having yet another
tool for geeks. It’s not about going back to the 90s (been there, was fun,
wouldn’t want to go back), it’s about taking the best of that ethos and
implementing it for 2020 and beyond. Right now, I’m trying to build a tool for
developers (including us) so that we can use it to build everything things for
everyday people that don’t require a Faustian pact to give up your privacy,
freedom of speech, or your personhood to use.

Whether or not this “succeeds”, who knows? But we’re sharing everything we
make under AGPL and trying to share every brick in this bridge we’re trying to
build between where we are (the sewer that is surveillance capitalism) and
where we want to be in hopes that if the stuff we build doesn’t work, at least
others can use the tools to build other solutions.

Here’s a recent talk if you’d like to learn more about what we’re working on:

[https://small-tech.org/videos/eastern-partnership-civil-
soci...](https://small-tech.org/videos/eastern-partnership-civil-society-
online-hackathon-2020/)

You don’t have to like what we do and you definitely don’t have to like me but
I do hope that you will consider the ideas (and ideals) we’re working towards.

~~~
pmlnr
Aral: you go rounds and rounds to reinvent ideas that are solved, and it's
been like this for years.

You could join any ActivityPub based project; even start one; build a Matrix
client with a web frontent; dig into Scuttlebutt; start working with Beaker on
dat://. Any of these choices are better, than starting yet another approach
from scratch and wasting a lot of time and effort on it.

Now, for the other issue: please don't try to coin new term that is confusing
to everyone. For example, there was a brilliant essay recently -
[https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/](https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-
small-web/) \- which used the same "small web" phrase in a very different
context. This is just the tip of the iceberg with the problem of using
something this generic.

~~~
detaro
"solved" is overstating it, but are already being worked on by groups that
have made good progress and a working base, and will continue to make
progress.

