Appreciation for the small web

I’ve increasingly been introducing the small web to my daily reading. The small web is a loosely defined concept, partly an attempt to refocus the internet on old school technology, on text websites with less or no JavaScript, and a mix of reactions against the increasing centralization and commercialization of the internet. Part of it is just regular people writing and creating communities for the joy of it, because they want to, rather than in the pursuit of profit, thought leadership, or followers.

You can find the small web in Bubbles, Kagi small web, and web rings or blog aggregators like https://ooh.directory/ or https://indieblog.page/. There’s Bear blog, which combines publishing and hosting of simple text blogs, and community.

These aggregators are great for discovering blogs, that you can then “subscribe” to using the small web technology of RSS/Atom feeds. It’s not hard to set up (although some companies beg to differ) and most blogs have feeds. I set up Miniflux on a VPS a while ago and I’ve been collecting blogs ever since. With ~80 blogs hooked up I get a decent amount of content on a daily basis.

The small web also has a lot of overlap with the communities popping up on the Atmosphere, using atproto to publish and share content on services like Leaflet and pckt. I previously wrote a bit about publishing posts from this blog to atproto. I think the protocol has tons of potential.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying exploring and stumbling upon varied and interesting topics, genuine voices, and I’m learning completely unexpected things. Like biking in Canada or bee baths. Sometimes it's just being introduced to cats (which is excellent). It’s a decentralized world of real people sharing and interacting, no big tech required. And a place that has a lot of opinions on whether or not to buy people coffee.

Go check out Bubbles or one of the blog aggregators, you might find something you really like! You can now also upvote this on Bubbles below, if you want.