# The Small Web 2025-07-27 08:39PM -0700 Using the web today can be annoying. Bloated pages that require you to jump through hoops to opt out of invasive tracking. Walled gardens like Facebook that hide content behind logins and algorithmic feeds. Lots of style, and less and less original substance as so much of the online space is filled up with AI generated slop. I'm old enough to remember a time when the web was simpler. As an example: did you know that Yahoo actually used to be a *directory* for the internet? Just a page that categorized sites by starting with broad categories like Businesses, Personal, Government. You would just click through categories, drilling down to find more specific content, only to end up on someone's personal web site where they shared whatever interested them. And the vast majority of sites were just that – something to read. No like button. No cookies. No pop-ups. Though, maybe an overabundance of animated GIFs and "under construction" banners. There's a notable recent increase in interest to – uh, I'm not sure exactly. Rediscover? Reinvent? Recreate? – that kind of web. There's a great page that covers a lot of ground on this topic here: => https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/ In particular I want to go through this link to find some inspiration: => https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html text-only websites Some other reading on the topic: => https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/where-have-all-the-websites-gone/ ## Dabbling In the last few years, I've been slowly zeroing back in on the "Small Web" via a project I created called Diskuto: => https://github.com/diskuto/ Diskuto was my attempt to take the popular social networks of the time (mostly Facebook, Twitter, and Mastodon. This was pre-Bluesky and Threads) and make them not just decentralized (like Mastodon's federation) but also distributed and decentralized. The rough idea was: * You can host your own server * ... with friends, if you want. * There's a way to sync content between servers (via plain ol' HTTP GETs.) * Servers don't allow internet randos/spammers/scammers/abusers to write to them by default, but will allow content from those you follow. * Content is digitally signed, so even if it's copied around the distributed system, you can still authenticate that it is unaltered. * In particular, you can verify that the content is from someone you follow. (Not an ad. Not "promoted" or "suggested" content.) * No engagement-farming algorithm, just a simple chronological feed of those whom you "follow". (Think: LiveJournal. or an RSS feed.) I had a lot of fun building it and learned a lot along the way. And I built some tools to populate it with various feeds, so I still use it as a sort of RSS reader / feed aggregator for myself. But, it still ended up being rather heavy. Especially initial versions, which used 100% client-side rendering, to show that the protocol would allow for such a thing. (See! You can write your own UI that has access to all the same data!) In the 1.0 release, most of the pages are now entirely rendered server-side, which inches closer to the "small web" in that it's a much more lightweight experience to browse posts. But there's still a bit of left-over ideological cruft from the social networks that it's trying to emulate: the idea that you need to fit, adapt, or convert your content to be part of the system. To make it uniquely identifiable, machine readable, copyable. Attributable to a single User. Correctly tagged with all the required metadata. Immutable. Indelible. Quantifiable. "Content". ## Project Gemini I recently learned of Project Gemini. I wrote about it here, so I'm going to try not to rehash too much of that: => ../blog/2025/06/project-gemini/ Thoughts on Project Gemini I was not convinced of the need for a new network protocol separate from HTTP for file transfer. In fact, it feels a bit exclusionary. "Oh, you can't read this site. You don't have the right kind of browser." But, with AI bots mercilessly scraping every bit of the web to repurpose for their own use, I understand a desire to distance oneself from all of that. ## Keep It Simple Still, the idea of simple, lightweight, text-first web sites is appealing enough that I've been spending more time in that area. I've adopted gemtext as the main format for this site. If you `curl` the site or browse it with a gemtext-aware browser, you'll get simple gemtext, which is readable as plaintext. If you're using a web browser, that text has been rendered into HTML for you by a tool I wrote called Gemi: => https://jsr.io/@nfnitloop/gemi And I've recently released a GUI browser for gemtext and plaintext: => https://github.com/nfnitloop/egemi It gives you a lot of the benefits of using a Gemini browser (privacy, simplicity, fewer distractions and annoyances), but can browse over HTTP(S) too. ## Bridging the Gap I'd love to have the best of both worlds, if possible. Simplicity, but longevity. In Diskuto, if people "follow" you, they'll copy your content to their servers, so what you post can survive even if your server crashes, or falls out of /FASCI/on with your current government. OTOH, maybe being able to disappear from the net as you wish has its advantages. If you know of tech in these spaces, let me know! ## Some Links I'll end out this rambling with some more links to small-web-y places I've come across and should remember to re-visit: => https://smol.pub/ "[a] tiny blogging service" accessible via web, gemini & gopher. => https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/ "A command-line and offline-first smolnet browser/feed". I haven't used this yet, but it looks like something I'd like. Reminds me of the old offline BBS mailreaders like BlueWave. (And Diskuto, to some extent, since it was designed with offline in mind.) => https://midnight.pub/ "a virtual pub that lets you write posts and create pages." Delightfully text-y. I've seen some good writing there. => https://github.com/buckket/twtxt "a decentralised, minimalist microglobbing service for hackers". I love small tools like this. Put comments in text file. Make a list of text files to follow. Boom, decentralized microblogging. Neat! => gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ "A feed aggregator with a twist". That twist? It's based on push, over gemini protocol. If you push a URL to your RSS/gemlog feed, it'll (eventually) include links to your pages to its global feed.