The “small web” is bigger than you might think

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Small Web as Mindset and Reaction to the Modern Web

  • Many frame the “small web” less as size and more as mindset: personal publishing, low commercial pressure, non-enshittified experiences.
  • It’s seen as an alternative to short-form, ad-saturated, engagement-optimized platforms.
  • Some argue nostalgia plays a role, but the core motivation is escaping commercialization and tracking.
  • Others don’t want a separate “small web” at all, preferring to stay on the main web and hope it improves.

Gemini, SmolNet, and Alternative Protocols

  • Gemini is praised for simplicity, privacy, and text focus, but criticized as too restrictive (no inline images, limited formatting, anti-extension culture).
  • Some see it as missing what made the 90s web exciting: rich experimentation with the medium, not just minimalism.
  • SmolNet protocols (Gemini, Gopher, etc.) are noted as fragmentary; new incompatible protocols appear whenever someone wants a tweak.
  • There is interest in “Markdown-web” or HTTP-without-JS/cookies as a more practical alternative.

Discovery, Search, and Curation

  • A recurring theme: small sites exist but are buried by mainstream search, especially Google’s popularity- and commerce-oriented ranking.
  • Marginalia-search is highlighted as an independent, non-monetized engine that surfaces personal, non-slop content; relevance varies by query but is improving.
  • Kagi Small Web and similar curated lists (indieblog.page, RSS-based aggregators, 1mb/512kb clubs, blogrolls) are used as discovery tools.
  • Shell snippets and browser commands to open random small sites show a DIY, tooling-oriented culture.

Scale, Criteria, and Long Tail

  • Hand-curated lists work for 10–50 sites (daily reading) or ~30k sites (Kagi), but miss much of the long tail.
  • Criteria like “must be a blog,” “recent posts,” English-only, no Substack, and requiring RSS or GitHub PRs exclude many worthy sites.
  • Some value rarely updated but high-quality blogs; others want active feeds. Recency bias is seen as harmful for some use cases.

Monetization and Sustainability

  • Strong anti-monetization sentiment coexists with arguments for ethical, small-scale business models (subscriptions, non-intrusive ads).
  • Some warn that equating “good” with “unpaid” pushes power toward large corporations that can afford to operate at a loss.
  • There’s interest in indie-friendly, non-exploitative monetization patterns cataloged by the IndieWeb community.

Technology Boundaries: JS, Tracking, Encryption

  • Opinions differ on what “small” should technically mean:
    • Some blame client-side dynamism (XHR/fetch), cookies, third-party requests, and tracking more than JS/CSS themselves.
    • Others want stricter constraints (no JS, no cookies, or even no TLS) to constrain commercialization and simplify hosting.
  • A minority argue the small web should avoid encryption entirely to discourage commerce and simplify tiny servers, suggesting content-level signatures instead; critics counter that network tampering, tracking, and state surveillance make encryption effectively necessary.
  • “No-tracking” declarations and first-party-only cookies are proposed as a middle path for privacy without new protocols.

Culture, Aesthetics, and Community

  • Old web aesthetics like 88x31 buttons, webrings, “under construction” pages, and personal blogrolls are affectionately revived.
  • RSS is repeatedly cited as a solved solution for “too many sites,” but many newer sites lack feeds.
  • Some see Gemini/Fediverse/small protocols as niche “shell script slab city” mostly for techies; others like precisely that cozy, slower, more intentional culture.