The Small Web

What is the small web?

  • The small web refers to an ongoing movement to return to 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 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.

Small Web Primers

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 its worth watching, 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
  • 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.