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The “small web” is bigger than you might think

560 points| speckx | 9 days ago |kevinboone.me | reply

241 comments

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[+] susam|9 days ago|reply
A little shell function I have in my ~/.zshrc:

  pages() { for _ in {1..5}; do curl -sSw '%header{location}\n' https://indieblog.page/random | sed 's/.utm.*//'; done }
Here is an example output:

  $ pages
  https://alanpearce.eu/post/scriptura/
  https://jmablog.com/post/numberones/
  https://www.closingtags.com/blog/home-networking
  https://www.unsungnovelty.org/gallery/layers/
  https://thoughts.uncountable.uk/now/
On macOS, we can also automatically open the random pages in the default web browser with:

  $ open $(pages)
Another nice place to discover independently maintained personal websites is: https://kagi.com/smallweb
[+] unsungNovelty|8 days ago|reply
Hey!!!!!

That is my website! To be fair, the hard part is hard to keep a personal website regularly updated without making people think it's abandoned. I don't have a regular post cadence. So it looks like I don't touch the website at all for months. But I regularly update my posts and other sections event if there isn't any new posts.

I also wrote something similar to OP - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...

And I'd like to also mention https://marginalia-search.com/ which is a small OSS search engine I have been using more and more theese days. I find it great to find IndieWeb / Small Web content.

[+] ddtaylor|9 days ago|reply
Anyone curious this is the same for Linux, except use xdg-open like this:

  $ xdg-open $(pages)
[+] sdoering|9 days ago|reply
This is so lovely. Just adopted it for arch. And set it up, so that I can just type `indy n` (with "n" being any number) and it opens n pages in my browser.

Thanks for sharing.

[+] matheusmoreira|8 days ago|reply
These curated discovery services require RSS and Atom feeds. My site doesn't even have those. Looks like I'm too small for the small web.
[+] oooyay|9 days ago|reply
Caveat that Kagi gates that repo such that it doesn't allow self-submissions so you're only going to see a chunk of websites that other people have submitted that also know about the Kagi repo.
[+] viscousviolin|9 days ago|reply
That's a lovely bit of automation.
[+] dwedge|8 days ago|reply
That top one only updates once a year. Not saying that as a criticism, just how lucky he was to update recently enough to end up in this top comment
[+] postalcoder|8 days ago|reply
Multiple layers of curation works really well. Specifically, using HN as a curation layer for kagi's small web list. I implemented this on https://hcker.news. People who have small web blogs should post them on HN, a lot of people follow that list!
[+] varun_ch|9 days ago|reply
A fun trend on the "small web" is the use of 88x31 badges that link to friends websites or in webrings. I have a few on my website, and you can browse a ton of small web websites that way.

https://varun.ch (at the bottom of the page)

There's also a couple directories/network graphs https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://eightyeightthirty.one/

[+] 101008|9 days ago|reply
A beautiful trend that has been going for 30 years ;-)

One of the happiest moments of my childhood (I'm exagerating) was when my button was placed in that website that I loved to visit everyday. It was one of the best validations I ever received :)

[+] NooneAtAll3|9 days ago|reply
my main problem with such links is... how often do you update them? how often do you check those websites to see that they're still active?

I remember going through all the blogs linked on terry tao's blog - out of like 50 there were only 8-ish still alive :(

[+] bung|8 days ago|reply
gotta be using pixel fonts for those, they been around for 25 years, actually readable at 8px lol
[+] 8organicbits|9 days ago|reply
One objection I have to the kagi smallweb approach is the avoidance of infrequently updated sites. Some of my favorite blogs post very rarely; but when they post it's a great read. When I discover a great new blog that hasn't been updated in years I'm excited to add it to my feed reader, because it's a really good signal that when they publish again it will be worth reading.
[+] pixodaros|9 days ago|reply
One of the many things I disagree with Scott Alexander on is that to me, frequent blog updates signal poor quality not excellent writing. Its hard to come up with an independent, evidence-based opinion on something worth sharing every week, but easy to post about what you read lots of angry or scary posts about. People who post a lot also tend to have trouble finding useful things to do in their offline life. It is very unusual that he managed to be both a psychiatrist and a prolific blogger and he quit the psychiatry job before he had children or other care responsibilities.
[+] oopsiremembered|9 days ago|reply
I'm with you. Also, sometimes I'm specifically looking for some dusty old site that has long been forgotten about. Maybe I'm trying to find something I remember from ages ago. Or maybe I'm trying to deeply research something.

There's a lot more to fixing search than prioritizing recency. In fact, I think recency bias sometimes makes search worse.

[+] freediver|9 days ago|reply
To clarify criteria is less than 2 years since last blog post.
[+] est|9 days ago|reply
also kagi exclude non-English sites. Sad for mixed language blogs like mine.
[+] freediver|9 days ago|reply
Kagi Small Web has about 32K sites and I'd like to think that we have captured most of (english speaking) personal blogs out there (we are adding about 10 per day and a significant effort went into discovering/fidning them).

It is kind of sad that the entire size of this small web is only 30k sites these days.

[+] flir|9 days ago|reply
Suspect there's a long tail/iceberg you still haven't captured (source: you haven't found me yet and I'm not hiding, I'm just not chasing SEO).
[+] jopsen|9 days ago|reply
> I'd like to think that we have captured most of (english speaking) personal blogs

I think that's naive.

But maybe thats just because my blog wasn't on the list :)

[+] aquova|9 days ago|reply
What methods are you using to find them? I notice my own doesn't appear, although it does show up well under some (very niche) Google search terms. I suspect there's the potential for an order of magnitude more sites than have been found.
[+] savolai|9 days ago|reply
Does this use frames or iframe? https://kagi.com/smallweb

I would expect a raw link in the top bar to the page shown, to be able to bookmark it etc.

[+] zahlman|9 days ago|reply
Does this concept of "personal blog" include people periodically sharing, say, random knowledge on technical topics? Or is it specifically people writing about their day-to-day lives?

How would I check if my site is included?

[+] Cyan488|9 days ago|reply
I'm noticing sites that break the rules. I report (flag) them, is that useful or should I just PR to remove them?
[+] gzread|8 days ago|reply
It doesn't have mine, because no rss
[+] danhite|9 days ago|reply
Isn't this a simple compute opportunity? ...

> March 15 there were 1,251 updates [from feed of small websites ...] too active, to publish all the updates on a single page, even for just one day. Well, I could publish them, but nobody has time to read them all.

if the reader accumulates a small set of whitelist keywords, perhaps selected via optionally generating a tag cloud ui, then that est. 1,251 likely drops to ~ single page (most days)

if you wish to serve that as noscript it would suffice to partition in/visible content eg by <section class="keywords ..." and let the user apply css (or script by extension or bookmarklet/s) to reveal just their locally known interests

[+] shermantanktop|9 days ago|reply
This is a specific definition of "small web" which is even narrower than the one I normally think of. But reading about Gemini, it does make me wonder if the original sin is client-side dynamism.

We could say: that's Javascript. But some Javascript operates only on the DOM. It's really XHR/fetch and friends that are the problem.

We could say: CSS is ok. But CSS can fetch remote resources and if JS isn't there, I wonder how long it would take for ad vendors to have CSS-only solutions...or maybe they do already?

[+] upboundspiral|9 days ago|reply
I think the article briefly touches on an important part: people still write blogs, but they are buried by Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness.

Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com .

It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, writings, all by real people. I am always fascinated by what it unearths when using it, and it really is a breath of fresh air.

It's currently funded by NLNet (temporarily) and the project's scope is really promising. It's one of those projects that I really hope succeeds long term.

The old web is not dead, just buried, and it can be unearthed. In my opinion an independent non monetized search engine is a public good as valuable as the internet archive.

So far as I know marginalia is the only project that instead of just taking google's index and massaging it a bit (like all the other search engines) is truly seeking to be independent and practical in its scope and goals.

[+] wink|8 days ago|reply
I don't want to be part of the "small web" - I want to be part of the web. If my stuff can't be found in a sea of a million ad-ridden whatever sites so be it, but I am not going out of my way to submit stuff to special search engines or web rings, I've been there in the 90s.
[+] 627467|9 days ago|reply
I read alot against monetization in the comments. I think because we are used monetization being so exploitative, filled with dark patterns and bad incentives on the Big Web.

But it doesnt need to be thia way: small web can also be about sustainable monetization. In fact there's a whole page on that on https://indieweb.org/business-models

There's nothing wrong with "publishers" aspiring to get paid.

[+] ardeaver|9 days ago|reply
I also think equating good = "no monetization" is exactly how we've ended up in a situation where everything is controlled by a few giant mega corps, hordes of MBAs, and unethical ad networks.

We should want indie developers, writers, etc to make money so that the only game in town doesn't end up being those who didn't care about being ethical. </rant>

[+] Peteragain|8 days ago|reply
I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities exist? A real question - not rhetorical. Whatever the answer, I am sure the same mechanism could "pay for" public hosting.
[+] jmclnx|9 days ago|reply
I moved my site to Gemini on sdf.org, I find it far easier to use and maintain. I also mirror it on gopher. Maintaining both is still easier than dealing with *panels or hosting my own. There is a lot of good content out there, for example:

gemini://gemi.dev/

FWIW, dillo now has plugins for both Gemini and Gopher and the plugins work find on the various BSDs.

[+] tonymet|9 days ago|reply
I’m not sold on gemini. Less utility, weaker, immature tools. Investing on small HTTP based websites is the right direction. One could formalize it as a browser extension or small-web HTTP proxy that limits JS, dom size, cookie access etc using existing Web browsers & user agents.
[+] GuB-42|9 days ago|reply
I don't expect many people to agree but I think that the "small web" should reject encryption, which is the opposite direction that Gemini is taking.

I don't deny the importance of encryption, it is really what shaped the modern web, allowing for secure payment, private transfer of personal information, etc... See where I am getting at?

Removing encryption means that you can't reasonably do financial transactions, accounts and access restriction, exchange of private information, etc... You only share what you want to share publicly, with no restrictions. It seriously limits commercial potential which is the point.

It also helps technically. If you want to make a tiny web server, like on a microcontroller, encryption is the hardest part. In addition, TLS comes with expiring certificates, requiring regular maintenance, you can't just have your server and leave it alone for years, still working. It can also bring back simple caching proxies, great for poor connectivity.

Two problems remain with the lack of encryption, first is authenticity. Anyone can man-in-the-middle and change the web page, TLS prevents that. But what I think is an even better solution is to do it at the content level: sign the content, like a GPG signature, not the server, this way you can guarantee the authenticity of the content, no matter where you are getting it from.

The other thing is the usual argument about oppressive governments, etc... Well, if want to protect yourself, TLS won't save you, you will be given away by your IP address, they may not see exactly what you are looking at, but the simple fact you are connecting to a server containing sensitive data may be evidence enough. Protecting your identity is what networks like TOR are for, and you can hide a plain text server behind the TOR network, which would act as the privacy layer.

[+] lasgawe|9 days ago|reply
mm, yeah. I like the idea of the small web not as a size category but as a mindset. people publishing for the sake of sharing rather than optimizing for attention or monetization.
[+] Gunax|9 days ago|reply
It's sad how the snall web became invisible.

I used to use all sorts of small websites in 2005. But by 2015 I used only about 10 large ones.

Like many changes, I cannot pinpoint exactly when this happened. It just occurred to me someday that I do not run into many unusual websites any longer.

It's unfortunate that so much of our behavior is dictated by Google. I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites.

And like a highway closeure ripples through small town economies, it was barely noticed by travellers but devestating to recipients. What were once quaint sites became abandoned.

The second force seems to be video. Because video is difficult and expensive to host, we moved away from websites. Travel blogs were replaced with travel vlogs. Tutorials became videos.

[+] oxag3n|9 days ago|reply
> To be fair, I should point out that the “small” web was never defined by the number of sites, but by the lack of commercial influence.

That was my understanding before it grew - it's a web of small indie sites.

[+] lich_king|9 days ago|reply
It's easy to hand-curate a list of 5,000 "small web" URLs. The problem is scaling. For example, Kagi has a hand-curated "small web" filter, but I never use it because far more interesting and relevant "small web" websites are outside the filter than in it. The same is true for most other lists curated by individual folks. They're neat, but also sort of useless because they are too small: 95% of the things you're looking for are not there.

The question is how do you take it to a million? There probably are at least that many good personal and non-commercial websites out there, but if you open it up, you invite spam & slop.