
Rediscovering the Small Web - livatlantis
https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/
======
kickscondor
If you're interested in recent innovations on this front: (rather than just
retreading the same Web as before)

* Beaker ([https://beakerbrowser.com](https://beakerbrowser.com)) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed5246a1b1f53d51a1feaeb1315266f769ac218436f12fda830/. And the posts are stored locally.)

* [https://special.fish/](https://special.fish/) This completely low-tech social network has taken off. The innovation here is that it's all just focused on profile pages - not feeds of random posts.

* There's a growing subculture of public Tiddlywikis (philosopher.life, sphygm.us, etc) - rather than focusing on protocols and APIs, they are much more focused on how to organize and style personal hypertext.

* As for RSS, well, as HN custom insists, I am also commenting to plug my own fraidyc.at. See, you knew it was here.

* On a related note, I've also been working on an RSS/Atom extension to handle ephemeral posts: live streams, "stories", pinned posts, etc. [https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Exten...](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Extensions)

* There's also a forum on tiny personal link directories that's been forming at [https://forum.indieseek.xyz](https://forum.indieseek.xyz). The idea here is to use Yahoo! or DMOZ style link directories at a smaller scale, to catalog corners of the Web. (Note that this whole comment itself is a kind of small 'directory'. Rather than an algorithm stepping in to show you 'related' stuff, I have.)

~~~
Do4oolu5
Beaker came to my mind immediately as well when reading this article :) It
sounds so much like the perfect fit for the author.

The new beta has been quite depressing for me, as all my personal apps stopped
working due to their complete rewrite of their API. I don't know if I'll ever
be willing to start it all over again.

But for anyone who hasn't already played with it, I totally recommend it. It
feels like the web we should have had.

~~~
pfraze
Really sorry about breaking your old apps. If you ping me on twitter
(@pfrazee) or IRC, I can spend some time helping you convert them over. Most
of the same capabilities are there (or on the way) so we'll hopefully just
need to update the code.

EDIT: for anybody curious, we had to make breaking changes to the p2p protocol
and used that as a chance to bundle a lot of improvements -- mainly with
performance and reliability. It sucked to break existing content though.

~~~
yepthatsreality
> EDIT: for anybody curious, we had to make breaking changes to the p2p
> protocol and used that as a chance to bundle a lot of improvements -- mainly
> with performance and reliability. It sucked to break existing content
> though.

What guarantees are in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen again in the
future? I really like the project and realize it’s still young and can
probably risk piling on breaking changes, but I can’t imagine future upgrade
paths will involve contacting one of the project maintainers on Twitter.

~~~
pfraze
> What guarantees are in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen again in the
> future?

I will say that I'm personally embarrassed that we had to do it. I don't like
disappointing people who support our work. There was a post on HN recently
about how Unity keeps breaking its platform; I don't want to end up like that.

The other thing I'll say is, there was a year-long gap from the 0.8.x beaker
releases to the 1.0, and a lot of that time was connected to the engineering
work on the protocol. The top priority was scaling, but we also added tooling
the protocol so that if a similar breaking change is needed in the future, we
can handle it smoothly.

------
asaibx
My favourite portal for discovering sites like this is something I discovered
just recently here on HN: [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/)

It never fails to amaze me how much amazing stuff is out there online, hidden
by a thick layer of top search results, and even more than that, the sheer
amount of individual and collective effort that has been put into each of
these sites. Someone mentioned the word "niche" and there is certainly some
weirdly (or wonderfully) specific content you will find in the Wiby.me index.
Lots of sites that haven't been updated since 1998, but still have an enormous
and encyclopedic list of everything related to some topic (like the
characteristics of different types of tomatoes, or how to build a motorcycle
from spare parts or whatever). Some of it may be a little out of date, but a
lot of it has been submitted for indexing precisely because of its
timelessness or continued usefulness.

Whenever I feel hopeless about the current state of the web, I find this is
the perfect antidote!

~~~
hattori31
This is absolutely awesome. For example, searching for pokemon gives blogs
from 2000 about the "new movie". Far too nostalgic.

------
StavrosK
I've been thinking about this for ages, and I want my own contribution to this
to be a simple webring service.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept, a webring was a simple circular linked
list. You had a link on your knitting-themed site to the "next knitting-themed
site", that site had a link to the next one, etc.

To join the ring, you just emailed someone and said "hey, I, too, have a
knitting-themed site, can you add me to your webring?", they looked at your
site, and changed their link to your site, you added the link they previously
had, and the ring continued.

I want to build something simple that'll serve a small widget with
previous/next/random site buttons, it'll work like the webrings of old
regarding the curation aspect, so to get added you'll need to be referred to
by someone.

Would you use something like that? You'd basically just drop a bit of HTML on
your page and it wouldn't load heavy JS/analytics/crap, just whatever was
necessary to paint a few links.

~~~
kickscondor
There was a small resurgence of webrings in last year:

Hotline Webring: [https://hotlinewebring.club](https://hotlinewebring.club)

XXIIVV Webring: [https://webring.xxiivv.com](https://webring.xxiivv.com)

Weird Wide Webring:
[https://weirdwidewebring.net](https://weirdwidewebring.net)

I'm personally more into personal directories and blogrolls than these random
clicks - but they still seem to be a good way to put together a small
community. (And this post isn't meant to discourage you - but rather to
encourage you to form your own.)

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, that's very useful information, thank you! Personal directories seem more
useful and easier to put together, I think you're right.

~~~
kickscondor
Well then here are some little directories to inspire you! :)

* Edwin Wenink's 'etc' page: [https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/etc/etc/](https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/etc/etc/)

* Gabby Lord's: [https://omglord.com](https://omglord.com)

* Fingers.today: [https://fingers.today](https://fingers.today)

* Neonauticon: [https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/](https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/)

* Gwern: [https://www.gwern.net](https://www.gwern.net) (the whole thing is a massive personal directory)

~~~
marttt
Great list. I would like to add UbuWeb, a massive collection of hard-to-find
avant garde art, movies and texts. Curated by hand by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Online since circa 1996 (and I think he has also more or less kept the
original layout).

[http://ubu.com](http://ubu.com)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Goldsmith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Goldsmith)

------
chris_f
When I picture it in my head I think of the early web as more of a library.
Over time it has transitioned into a shopping mall.

If I continue with this thought exercise, a lot of the big indoor shopping
malls around me have been knocked down and replaced with standalone outdoor
stores (walled gardens?).

I'm not sure where things are going next.

~~~
karatestomp
I think there have been two main changes that have hurt the web:

1) The shift from spammy shit content as something to squash to something to
allow _and even promote over better content_ , provided it follows certain
(Google's) rules. This shift (in terms of Google's behavior) happened
~2008-2010 and we haven't seen a period of spammy crap content getting heavily
downranked since then, like we used to when they were still trying to stay
ahead of it rather than give it a "legitimate" avenue as a method of control.
Google's still being the most important search provider to appease has left
the rest unable to direct behavior toward anything better than what does well
on Google, so their results aren't much better.

2) A move away from actual or _de facto_ open systems & protocols to
deliberately carved up communities. The only thing keeping chat, Twitter-like
services, and other social media—hell, even Youtube, so far as some kind of
format for hosting video with metadata—from being standards or protocols is
that business incentives reward "owning" a userbase (so you can better spy on
them, and to keep anyone from providing a better, perhaps less-spying-laden
client and "stealing" ad-viewing eyeballs)

Both of these are fundamentally problems of the spyvertising economy taking
over the Web and I think a lot of the issues would go away if we could
(legally—I don't think tech will do it) permanently and completely break that.
More specifically a big part of the problem is Google, though of course the
rest of the Web giants are gleefully following similar bad incentives.

~~~
zozbot234
I don't think search engines are promoting spammy $#!+ content per se; what
they're doing is heavily promoting _newer_ content that's relevant to the
_most common_ search queries, as this gives them the only real hope of staying
ahead of the spam. Of course the "small", long-lasting, independent Web is
heavily disadvantaged by this shift.

One development that would be good for small web sites to look into is
schema.org linked-data formats. Those might simply be too effort-intensive for
the spammers to adopt (at a high level of detail) and perhaps too much of a
commitment to quality and transparency (they would have to actively _forge_
the info, which would leave them open to bans given the lack of plausible
deniability), so they might become a viable signal of quality and lead to
higher visibility in SERP.

(Similar for things like proper separation of style from content, that have
always been advocated for in the web-standards community but are not really
commercially viable.)

I'm not quite sure if others have experimented with this stuff already, but it
seems worth trying.

------
fossuser
This is a great post and makes me miss this type of content.

I created a subreddit recently to help with the discovery problem and posted
it on HN earlier this week.

Show HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287286)

Subreddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/)

It’s been going well so far, only a small solution to a big problem, but it’s
been fun to discover a lot of interesting blogs from people in this community.

If you missed the initial post feel free to join and add yours too.

~~~
livatlantis
Excellent! Joined, thank you!

~~~
fossuser
Thanks! I think your site is awesome, it's exactly the kind of thing I think
of, when I think of the best of what the internet can be.

I'm a fan.

[Edit]: I also caught a tiny typo:

> "But the web is not always "profit-oriented" and it certainly does not need
> be "user-centric" (and I say this as a UX consultant)."

I think you wanted "does not need _to_ be"

I created a PR for you:
[https://github.com/parimalsatyal/neu/pull/2](https://github.com/parimalsatyal/neu/pull/2)

~~~
livatlantis
Thank you, merged!

------
zargon
Somewhat related is [https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/)

It's a search engine that removes the top million domains from your search
results (or top 100,000 or 10,000, etc). I find it useful sometimes to
discover things on more obscure sites.

~~~
SV_BubbleTime
Just tried that for a C error I have, that... was super helpful. I've seen a
lot of alternative search engines but this something else. Good link.

------
pcmaffey
The word is _niche_.

There are 2 major factors that will power a resurgence, that could use better
tools:

1\. Discoverability - self-reinforcing webrings, blogrolls, directories, ad
free-search etc.

2\. Creation - next-gen Dreamweaver. A low-code site creator app that exports
a static website as a folder of readable CSS/HTML that people can tinker with
by hand (and learn), instead of being locked into one of these cloud WYSIWYG
site generators. Hosting is solved. No need to tie the one to the other...

~~~
marc_io
Number two could be Publii? It seems to met all the requirements you
mentioned.

------
the_af
This is a great article, the kind of stuff I find interesting on HN.

Some of the "old school" web style clashes with my aesthetic sensibilities
these days -- a lot of words to say I find it somewhat ugly! -- but I miss its
hobbyist, non-commercial aspect. A lot of hobby style content I find
interesting has moved to YouTube or Facebook these days, and everyone who's
been reading HN is aware of the lack of control authors have over those
platforms...

I found myself nodding in agreement to a lot of what the author was saying.

I don't miss the "geocities look" though!

~~~
livatlantis
Indeed, I enjoy that æsthetic in certain contexts, admittedly because it makes
me nostalgic more than anything else. I had to exercise restraint! :) I wanted
the site to remain readable and accessible in text mode/lynx/screen readers
and respect basic typograhical conventions.

But I agree with you that the thing that I miss the most is the hobby-ist,
non-commercial aspect. But I'm discovering a lot of great links on this HN
thread!

------
x3blah
"The Commercial Web (of Marketing)

There has always been a place for commerce and marketing on the web."

Not really true as I remember it. The web opened up to the public in 1993.
There was no commerce and marketing in the beginning. Even by 1996 while
commerce and marketing may have existed, e.g., Amazon founded in 1995, its
place was in the background. As I rememember the early web, the foreground,
the "starting point" or "portal", was something like Yahoo! You had to pick a
topic (direction) that you wanted to go in. For example, if you were after
music, you might end up browsing the Internet Underground Music Archive. The
"front page" of the portal was predominantly non-commercial, mostly generic
headings for topics. If you wanted to search out something commercial, no
doubt you could but the initial starting point was _intellectual curiosity_.
This is IMO what has been lost over time with regard to web use: intellectual
curiosity and the ability to actually satisfy it. (A fun tangent here is the
collections of inane queries that people type into Google. These are
simultaneously hilarious and disturbing.)

As an experiment have a look at the Yahoo! page today. It is full of low
quality mainstream "news". There is zero attention to intellectual curiosity.
Nothing to see here, folks, but here is the latest news. For part 2 of the
experiment, run a Google search for the term "music". The results are
dominated by YouTube. Every result is directly or indirectly commercial
(either selling something or conducting surveillance and serving ads), except
one: Wikipedia. The chances of someone new to the web not following a link to
YouTube or some other Google-controlled domain would seem almost nil.

The "onboarding" process for new web users is very different today than it was
in the early 1990's. Perhaps it is still possible to approach the web with a
sense of awe and wonder, pondering "What is out there?" However a new web user
is scant likely to end up on a non-commercial website besides Wikipedia. What
is out there? Surveillance, ads and an endless supply of soon-to-be-obsolete
Javascript du jour.

~~~
zozbot234
The old Web directories had a "Business" section where _everything_ commercial
or sale-related was listed. Then sub-levels of any other section, e.g.
"Music", would include a cross-reference to the same topic in the "Business"
hierarchy. But the _default_ assumption was that you were looking for non-
commercial, or at most ad-supported sites.

------
lxe
I just got into ham radio. The websites related to the hobby are basically
what the web was like before everything coalesced around search and social
networks.

~~~
snazz
In my experience, that's true of many specific hobbies--bicycling, sailing,
gardening, etc. It's especially true of hobbies where purchasing ever-more-
expensive things isn't so important. Hobbies like cars have more magazine-like
and shopping-mall-like sites compared to less consumerist ones (although bikes
can be like that too).

~~~
Mediterraneo10
I wouldn't say that this is still true of bicycling, at least not bicycle
touring. The amount of standalone blogs in that hobby have plunged drastically
now that people choose to simply upload photos to Instagram, and what few
blogs exist are often buried in Google search results. One can see that
standalone forums are emptying out, reduced to mainly middle-aged members, as
younger generations turn to Reddit or Facebook for all their discussion of the
hobby. Within the bikepacking segment, Bikepacking.com (which presents itself
as a community resource but is essentially just one big advertisement for its
sponsors) has a chokehold on the community.

I was fortunate to get into bicycle touring at a time when standalone blogs
were easy to find, some of them were masterfully written, and there was not
yet the mercenary desire to monetize one’s content and become an "influencer".
The web of 2020 is very different, and because Google deranks older content, a
lot of newbies in the hobby today won't even become aware of the former state
of affairs even if much of that content remains just as relevant today.

~~~
snazz
I can see that. At the same time, sites like Sheldon Brown's and some of the
older MTB forums still rank well in Google searches.

------
ferzul
there's also pubnix (public unix-like servers), gopher, and a new protocol
called gemini (which adds simple links and viewer-owned formatting to to
gopher). i think there's certainly something to the idea behind more
restrictions, with just enough rather than plenty.

i almost want to give myself nothing but wikipedia, api docs, and “small web”
and pubnix. i'm not sure that i can give up hn or its ilk (but the ratio of
interesting content to poor content is terrible)

~~~
livatlantis
Yes, I'm discovering the newer pubnix now (only knew of sdf.org previously).
Looks interesting, if a little overkill for what I'm looking for. Glad they
exist though.

You can perhaps try a week of _mostly_ limiting yourself to those and see how
it goes? I personally do a mix of the "normal" web and more niche stuff out
there.

~~~
gindely
Yes, I just signed up on the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic
earlier this week. I intended to keep my gemini/gopher pages updated daily but
now is a good time to update them some more!

------
jamesjyu
J.K. Rowling is releasing a new novel chapter by chapter called "The Ickabog"
on a website [1]. I went there, fully expecting some over-engineered and
productized site, and was pleasantly surprised that it's a very clean, static
site: webmobile optimized, light svg graphics, clean markup.

No bullshit, just focused on the text and reading.

Hoping that more authors take this route when releasing stuff for the web.

[1] [https://www.theickabog.com/home/](https://www.theickabog.com/home/)

~~~
livatlantis
Indeed! This is a very pleasant site. And very happy to see no
analytics/tracking. Excellent example, thanks.

------
bovermyer
My own website is starting to "revert" to this concept. A few years ago, it
was primarily an about page and a resume. Now it has a blog, a links page, and
a "knowledge base" that's mostly just notes for myself.

I'm too burnt out on web "best practices" to care about that for my personal
sites anymore.

If you're curious: [https://benovermyer.com](https://benovermyer.com)

~~~
livatlantis
Indeed! It's so much more interesting to learn about what people are
interested in, beyond just their professional competencies. I really like that
you have your guiding philosophies, hobbies, languages and even Hogwarts house
on your about me page.

Kinda makes me want to make a more detailed about me page. If I enjoy these
kinds of details, surely some other people will too. Might do it this weekend.

~~~
bovermyer
That'd be cool to see!

------
entha_saava
I used Opera mini on a J2ME phone on a 2G GPRS connection in Rural India (when
studying in High school). The average speed was 5-10 KiB/s.

Opera Mini is one awesome browser for such connections. Average page sizes
were around __20 KiB__ (They use some compression proxy). No Javascript was
loaded. (Simple JS tasks were delegated to server side. I guess with some
optimizations they could save on those full page reloads, but maybe it was
computationally expensive for those phones).

There was a vibrant ecosystem for those phones. Till this day, those websites
that host pirated music from Indian movies work with simplest of WWW browsers.

That's nostalgia. I remember a Modded version of opera mini which had tonnes
of other features that worked on those phones with 4-8 MiB of memory (I don't
know exact specs though, they were not mentioned for those phones).

Even today, with my paranoid no-js no-web-fonts browsing (UBlock origin),
there are parts of web that are efficient. Hacker news or i.reddit.com, for
example.

------
lukehack
Not to be too spammy, but discovery of such sites is why I'm making Feldot, a
social domain aggregation site. There are so many sites available out there
like this to browse, but we never see them when using existing search engines.

[https://feldot.com](https://feldot.com)

------
z3t4
I like this article, and I also like hand typing HTML and CSS. But coding is
not for everyone. What we need is a better Wordpress, so ordinary people can
publish their own website. It has to look good, perform well and be secure,
but most importantly publishing content should be quick and easy.

~~~
godot
I think writing some basic HTML is not hard, what's hard is everything else
around hosting a web site properly nowadays. (and is where Wordpress wins
users, I think)

I have non-tech-savvy family who has started content web sites over 20 years
ago, by writing some basic HTML, and uses FTP to upload HTML files. It's a
mental model that's easily understood by someone who can operate Windows. He
went on to maintain the site for the next 20 years and it worked fine.

In the last couple of years I did a big migration for his site and moved it to
a markdown based CMS (PicoCMS in PHP) and he's been happy with it -- having a
web editor (and learning markdown, which was easy) and not have to FTP.

The thing is, it took work to set all that up (on my end, that he doesn't
see). I got a Digital Ocean server, installed a bunch of stuff around PHP,
wrote some custom plugins for the CMS, etc.

After having done that 3-4 years ago, I realized the more modern, ideal,
alternative is to have a Git repo of markdown files, and a Netlify setup (or
another similar service to Netlify) where check-ins are automatically
deployed.

The problem then is this -- Git workflows are way, way too difficult for non-
tech folks to understand. We're not even talking about command line or desktop
git clients; even asking someone to use Github (or Gitlab) to edit markdown
files to update their site is not an easy mental model to wrap around (if
you're not a coder).

I think the most ideal setup, this "better Wordpress" you mention, would be to
have a web UI to edit markdown files, backed by a git repo, hooked up with a
Netlify-like service. I thought about working on that as a project; but it
would be one that relies on using Github and Netlify as key pieces and I'm not
even sure Netlify allows a 3rd party to develop apps that end up creating
Netlify sites on behalf of other customers, which means I'd have to build out
the full Netlify deploy flow and I'm really not in the business of doing that.

~~~
nulbyte
For sites where a static-site generator will suffice, there is Forestry[1]. It
puts an editor-friendly frontend on top of Git. I have thought about this for
a few projects that involve folks who aren't very tech savvy, but none of them
have gained much momentum (for other reasons), so I've only given it a cursory
look. It seems pretty well put together, though.

[1]: [https://forestry.io](https://forestry.io)

------
pea
I had this the other day when I was reading about the origin of the word
'bear'. I found this page:
[https://charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html](https://charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html)

This is anecdotal, and I'm not making a "then vs. now" argument - but there
was something about the exchange that I found reminicent of this 'old web',
and totally devoid from the way people communicate nowadays. I can't put my
finger on it - but on what social platform where would this exchange live now?

~~~
jack1243star
Hacker News perhaps.

------
gregoire
Related: [http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/)

> tilde.club is not a social network it is one tiny totally standard unix
> computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to
> build awesome web pages

And the story behind it: [https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-
couple-drinks-...](https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-
drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf)

------
totalizator
I would love to see some kind of a proxy to parse modern websites so they can
be viewed via 56K modem on a 386/486 era computers. Any ideas? Some Squid
Cache wizardry maybe?

------
treelovinhippie
These folks have a brilliant philosophy on small tech: [https://small-
tech.org](https://small-tech.org)

------
matheusmoreira
Related: [http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/](http://contemporary-
home-computing.org/RUE/)

> It isn’t a particularly sophisticated way to show emotions or manifest an
> attitude, but still so much more interesting and expressive than what is
> available now:

> First of all, because it is an expression of a dislike, when today there is
> only an opportunity to like.

> Second, the statement lays outside of any scale or dualism: the dislike is
> not the opposite of a like.

> Third: it is not a button or function, it works only in combination with
> another graphic or word. Such a graphic needed to be made or found and
> collected, then placed in the right context on the page—all done manually.

> I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that
> the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution.

------
divbzero
I like the use of human navigation and curation in discovering the _small
web_. It feels more organic, more transparent, and less prone to manipulation
than AI driven search engines (Google) or aggregators (Facebook).

------
ekez
The author makes a distinction between the "commercial web" and "small web"
but I can't help but wonder if some overlap is possible.

I've recently been tasked with building a website for a small organic food
distributor in Oregon. I don't think the traditional image heavy "commercial
web" fits well with their company culture and image but am struggling to find
examples of "small web" commercial websites to show them as examples of a
different way.

It would be nice to see another post discussing how we might bring the small
web to the commercial one.

~~~
caribousoup
[https://www.lingscars.com](https://www.lingscars.com)

~~~
1bc29b36f623ba8
[http://www.arngren.net/](http://www.arngren.net/)

------
wickerman
I've been actually posting in a few telnet BBS, as well as some SSH forums as
of late. I love the small web. I love the freedom of anonymity. I grew up in
the 2000s and also got into web design through notepad and hand written HTML.
I do have a squarespace website but I'm thinking of just going to neocities
and start over with some plain HTML one.

------
autorun
I have friends who ask me to design theirs websites because I'm a web
developer, and it's not their fault, but what's explained here. I wish there
were more tools on the same page as Frontpage/Dreamweaver, so anyone could
make their own website, and publish it with a single click.

------
exabrial
What about we make a tor, but limited to dial-up speed and no protocols
invented after 2000 are allowed?

------
jll29
altavista.com now redirects to Verizon (Yahoo!).

Is there a Web search engine that only indexes non-commercial content?

~~~
livatlantis
There's [https://wiby.me](https://wiby.me) that's worked quite well for me so
far, for finding very niche/specific things and when I wanted to be surprised.

------
fudged71
Digital Gardens

