Small Web

Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:

Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting.

Developers, it’s time for you to choose a side: will you help rid the web of privacy-invading tracking or be complicit in it? What can I do? Remove third-party scripts from Google, Facebook, etc.

Enter the small web. The web used to be a place for small, personal websites full of diverse expression. Nowadays, the internet has become largely monolithic with most new websites being created for businesses. However the small web is

All the things people are doing to claw back the 'net from corporations.

we're a loose association of like-minded tilde communities. if you're interested in learning about *nix (linux, unix, bsd, etc) come check out our member tildes and sign up! tildes are pubnixes in the spirit of tilde.club, which was created in 2014 by paul ford.

we're a loose association of like-minded tilde communities. if you're interested in learning about *nix (linux, unix, bsd, etc) come check out our member tildes and sign up! tildes are pubnixes in the spirit of tilde.club, which was created in 2014 by paul ford.

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A tribe of people supporting each other to establish their creative footing.

The Smallweb Subway is an experimental project that seeks to connect communities online using webrings. A webring is a list of websites linked together in a circular structure. The usage of webrings dates back to the early days of the internet before search engines were widely adopted and when there were no big social media platforms with discovery algorithms. Webrings were ways for people to discover new sites by clicking through conveniently organized links, eventually bringing you back to where you started.

A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.

Datenstrom Yellow is for people who make small websites.

This is the home of the Tiny Awards, which, since 2023, has celebrated the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.

itty bitty things can be conveyed in a link.

What does a more natural, soft, and cozy internet look like?

There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion. It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Even if you do not particularly care for becoming the next big thing, it’s still discouraging to put work into a website and get next to no traffic beyond the usual bots.