I started moving back to the small web in 2025 as part of whole-of-life shift in the way I interact with technology and the online world. For me, this mostly involves moving away from social media platforms and big, corporate tech companies. And that meant rediscovering alternatives to what I had started to become dependent on, that is, subscription services, mainly, such as YouTube, Spotify, X/Twitter, etc. My goal has been to recreate those in a more human-centric way on the small web. This will be a living post that will serve to document how I went about that.
I’ve added a new page to cover The Small Web, in general.
YouTube
- No alternative yet that wouldn’t sacrifice quite a lot
- Potential alternatives: Archive.org, Khan Academy
- Although these can’t replace livestreams and ongoig organizations of real community being formed by groups like Paul Vander Klay’s This Little Corner
- I think I’ll let things settle for a year and see how I feel later. It’s already been quite a move so far.
- I currently pay for YouTube Premium to avoid the ads, that’s the major dealbreaker for me, I can’t stand ads. But, looking back at the monthly payment and how much I’ve spent just on YouTube is irksome.
Music
- iTunes to iPhone from music I own, purchased online or ripped from CDs to mp3
- Previously on Spotify Premium. Great service but accumulating regret looking back at how much I’ve spent on it. And just like every subscription, the price seems to go up every year or two.
- I might consider going back to an old school music player at some point but one step at a time
Knowledge Base
- MediaWiki
- Wikis are a great way have web-accessible living documents for anything you can think of
Virtual Community Alternatives
Communities like Paul Vander Klay and the TLC who meet up over live streams
- Audio with still images or ultra low fps like animated gifs
- Size would be relatively small (30MB/hour) at around 64-96kbit/sec AAC/MP3
- Could even archives files for later viewing/listening at that small size
- Small Web friendly
Search
- Brave Search – By the Brave privacy browser folks, completely independent web index. [My recommendation at this time.]
- Duck Duck Go – Privacy search engine and other privacy apps, based on Bing web index but privacy-respecting
- Marginalia Search – Privacy respecting, non-commercial prioritization results
- Wiby – “The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.”
- “In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.”
AI
AI might not be compatible with small web ethos but there are still some small, independent, privacy-respecting AI services out there
- Proton Lumo AI – From the gold standard Proton services guys who already do email, vpn, and more
- Duck AI – From the Duck Duck Go privacy search engine guys, free and multiple popular LLMs to play with
Questions
- How to livestream on the small web?