September 12, 2024 - Why shouldn’t a hacker camp badge have a Gemini client which picks up the camp schedule, for example? Because the Small Web is something of a broad term, this is the first part of a short series providing an introduction to the topic.

1 month ago - The 'small' web, the 'slow' web, or the 'indie' web - the non corporate, original style internet we knew and loved in the 90s and early 2000s (people just writing blogs and making their own websites) before corporations and algorithms seemed ...

August 7, 2020 - Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of “users”. When we refer to people, we call them people.

Small Web (or smallweb) is a term used in a 1999 article, a hosting service, two consulting services, a May 2020 article, a Aug 2020 blog post that describes a subset of IndieWeb principles, a HackerNews summary of Gemini, a curation of indie websites, most recently a Kagi Small Web initiative, and has variants smol web (smolweb) and smol net (smolnet).

In short, I think of it as the ... and the like. The “small web” is a term that’s lately used to describe websites, online spaces and protocols that focus on a “text-first” environment....

September 7, 2023 - For a deeper understanding, Ben Hoyt's "The Small Web is Beautiful" serves as an excellent primer.

Here are the main web pages I can find that do: Rediscovering the Small Web by Parimal Satyal: a fabulous article about the joy of small, independent (and sometimes retro) websites in contrast to the “commercial web”.

May 30, 2021 - I stumbled into the Small Web. A minimal barebone version of the web. It’s a place that remember me of a long gone web. It is the Small Web powered by the Gopher and Gemini protocols. Let’s see what it is and why I decided to create there a small intimate island.

April 21, 2024 - The small web is, at its roots, a response to trends that started with “Web 2.0”. As more and more online activity consolidated to a handful of very large websites, which optimized for user engagement and profit, the web became more homogeneous and mindless.

May 25, 2020 - No, technically, the modern web is more secure and more usable. This essay is my attempt to show you what the small and independent web can look like, why it’s different from the the sites that dominate web traffic today, why it's worth exploring and how easy it is for anyone to be a part of it.

Revisiting pre-industrial and industrial scale technologies and practices with an emphasis on low environmental impact. Rejects technological solutionism, planneed obsolecence and conusmer capitalism. Creating technologies that respect the limits of the planet by living better with less. The "Small Web" is a term coined by Aral Balkan in his essay What is the Small Web.

October 12, 2025 - To begin with, while there is no single definition, “small web” typically refers to the non-commercial part of the web, crafted by individuals to express themselves or share knowledge without seeking any financial gain.

March 2, 2026 - So far as I can tell, there’s no general consensus on what “small web” means. Broadly, it refers to non-commercial, personal websites, which typically use simple, static layouts without scripts. They’re usually small in terms of size (i.e., byte count), and often in terms of audience.

The elves are at work… · What is the Small Web

February 22, 2026 - The expression explains itself: a website made efficiently, friendly to the Internet user and affordable for all teams, since not only are large connections required to access some sites but also much of what is consumed is loaded onto the client, ...

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.

You know, weirdly looking websites written in HTML, being a form of expression, containing ugly gifs, marquee animations and so on. Since then I've become more and more interested in the small web, the part of the Internet quite different from tech giant platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Youtube.

I show that the World Wide Web is a small world, in the sense that sites are highly clustered yet the path length between them is small. I also demonstrate the advantages of a search engine which makes use of the fact that pages corresponding ...

As far as I can tell, this 2020 essay by Parimal Satyal seems to be the origin of “the small web” as a particular term. Nowadays, I see a lot of other highly similar ideas percolating around that use slightly different language: the humane web; the indie web; the rewilding of the internet.

January 25, 2026 - It’s built on principles like: ... control over their digital presence. ... The Small Web refers to the collection of personal, often non-commercial websites created by individuals rather than corporations....