Indyweb, small web, cozy web
March 5, 2020 — April 13, 2023
This only tangentially touches my to-do items, so notes are pretty much just linkdumps.
1 Basic idea
What is the Small Web? – Aral Balkan
The Big Web has “users” — a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. We farm users in server farms. On the Big Web, we can fit thousands of users into a single server and Megacorps “scale” to run thousands upon thousands of servers in their farms.
On the Big Web, you never own your own home. You must rent your home from Megacorps. Most often, you don’t have to pay for your home using money. You pay for it by forfeiting your privacy, freedom of speech, and your other human rights. ?Collectively, we pay for it by forfeiting a democratic future.1
The mass surveillance and factory farming of human beings on a global scale is the business model of people farmers like Facebook and Google. It is the primary driver of the socioeconomic system we call surveillance capitalism…
The Small Web, quite simply, is the polar opposite of the Big Web. It applies the Small Technology principles to the web.
The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2).
On the Small Web, you (and only you) own and control your own home (or homes)…
Another fundamental difference between the Big Web and Small Web is that on the Big Web we trust servers and distrust clients whereas on the Small Web, we distrust servers and trust clients. We treat servers as dumb delivery mechanisms. The client—under the control of the person who owns the site or app—is the only trusted environment.
2 Basic techniques
Static websites, blogs, feed readers…
Yair Rosenberg, It’s time to take back control of what we read on the internet — beginner’s guide to feeds as DIY internet
3 Indyweb
A particular sub-school of DIY social media with an artisanal/classic design feel and some lightweight additional interactions.
indywebify hugo. micropub for static sites 1. micropub for statics sites 2. misc static site recs. Netlify functions allow indy auth. eleventy is a site generator that tries to claw back simplicity from scope creep. gatsby supports webmentions. microformat metadata by example. Monocle is a nice looking reader that is popular accessing this site. There is a version online.
Before the beginning, we made a wish for a more expressive web. This is the tale of purple desert designs 🌵, silent HTML livestreams, MacPaint toolbars, Mario Kart-inspired JavaScript and our household gaudy drop shadows.
This is Multiverse — a constellation of internet corners, a micro-blogging network
4 Incoming
- The Unbearable Sameness of the Modern Web
- The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web
- Jeff Huang on durable websites targets professors.
- Some argue monopoly search engines make the internet boring.