The Small Web

What is the small web?

  • The small web refers to an ongoing movement to return to the form of the web before consolidated platforms really took over, such as Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and others.
  • The small web is known by other names: Old Web, Indie Web, Wonder Web, Wild Web, Retro Web, Web Revival, Personal Web, Yesterweb, Lofi Web, Fun Web, Directory Web, Tilde Web, Low-tech Web, Neocities Web, etc.
  • The IndieWeb is a related movement and is a “community of people building software to enable personal independently hosted websites to maintain their social data on their own”. [Wikipedia] The IndieWeb has 10 core principles:
    • Own your data.
    • Use & publish visible data for humans first, machines second.
    • Make what you need.
    • Use what you make.
    • Document your stuff.
    • Open source your stuff.
    • UX and design is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema etc.
    • Modularity.
    • Longevity.
    • Plurality.
    • And, an informal eleventh: Above all, Have fun.
  • In summary, be human, stay human.

Small Web Primers

Small Web Alternatives

The Internet Used to Be a Place

  • A video thumbnail caught my eye one day and its thumbnail said this: the internet lived in a room
  • The video was The Internet Used to Be a Place
  • The idea caught me more than the video, itself, although the video is worth a watch too
  • I grew up in the time before smartphones when the Internet did ‘live in a room’, so to speak, and those were better, healthier times, not just for me but everybody, since the advent of the smartphone and especially infinite scroll social media apps had not yet happened
  • It got me thinking about how to begin moving the addictive part of the Internet back into a room and onto a computer that I wouldn’t always have with me and so help me break bad habits

Why Gen Z Misses a Time They Never Knew

This is an important video on a related concept that covers Gen Z’s longing for something more tactile than a screen, more physical than an avatar, and more human than an image.

Gen z, anemoia, and lost identity

  • Anemoia is not just nostalgia, it’s not really about the past, it’s about the present being a promised future that never happened and how that interrupts identity discovery and formation.
  • Fascinating that the issue of our day is identity. This helps explain much about the vortex of unending identities that the West is currently pursuing instead of unity and shared culture.
  • The comments section is great. Many commenters suggesting reversing trend, getting rid of smart devices, getting rid of social media, and putting the internet back on a desktop computer in a room that you can’t carry with you 24/7. I fully support that and I recognize that my recent creative ideas have been around this idea of eventually ditching smart devices.
  • I don’t think anemoia is just a Gen Z / Gen Alpha phenomenon. I’m middle-aged and recognize that there is a difference in the world from before the internet and after the internet, before social media and after social media, and how modern digital, virtualized life plays into personhood and being and identity.