The “small web” is bigger than you might think

Posted by speckx 4 hours ago

The “small web” is bigger than you might think(kevinboone.me)

125 points | 46 commentspage 2

jmclnx 2 hours ago|

I moved my site to Gemini on sdf.org, I find it far easier to use and maintain. I also mirror it on gopher. Maintaining both is still easier than dealing with *panels or hosting my own. There is a lot of good content out there, for example:

gemini://gemi.dev/

FWIW, dillo now has plugins for both Gemini and Gopher and the plugins work find on the various BSDs.

tonymet 2 hours ago||

hats off to https://1mb.club/ and https://512kb.club/ for cataloging and featuring small web experiences

heliumtera 2 hours ago||

How many would be left after removing self promotion, AI generated content and "how I use AI?"(Claude code like everybody else)

romaniv 3 hours ago||

Small Web, Indie Web and Gemini are terminally missing the point. The web in the 90s was an ecosystem that attracted people because of experimentation with the medium, diversity of content and certain free-spirited social defaults. It also attracted attention because it was a new, exciting and rapidly expanding phenomenon. To create something equivalent right now you would need to capture those properties, rather then try to revive old visual styles and technology.

For a while I hoped that VR will become the new World Wide Web, but it was successfully torpedoed by the Metaverse initiative.

cdrnsf 2 hours ago||

There's an element of nostalgia, certainly but it's also a reaction to the overwhelmingly commercial web. Why not build something instead of scrolling through brief videos interspersed with more and more ads that follow you everywhere?

Large companies have helped build the web but they've done at least as much, if not more, to help kill it.

Karrot_Kream 1 hour ago||

The small web can be a lot of things, but IMO it gets too overrun by the ideologically zealous. One does not have to believe in primitive anarchism to enjoy camping, for example. In general it seems any niche idea on the internet is like candle flame to zealous moths.

gzread 3 hours ago|||

It's about capturing the noncommerciality, not the experimentation. Most of the small web sites are just blogs, a solved problem by now, but there's interesting content in many of them.

SirFatty 3 hours ago||

Which is exactly the point of Gemini.

skeeter2020 3 hours ago|||

I'm a dinosaur who bemoans the loss of whatever-it-was we had prior to the mass exploitation and saturation of the web today, so I feel it's my duty to check out Gemini and stop complaining. I'm prepared to trade ease of use or some modern functionality for better content and less of what the internet has become.

mattlondon 2 hours ago|||

Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining.

The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination.

Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me)

It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.

myylogic 2 hours ago||

great work

productinventor 1 hour ago|

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