What Is the Small Web? | Hacker News Reader

What Is the Small Web?

ar.al

89 pointstbassetto118 comments

I'm generally on board with the sentiment, but some of this rhetoric is a bit much, even for me.

> The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit.

Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before the web.

Ages ago I ran a small local community forum, very much small web and way before FAANG, and one 'user' was very upset having the tag 'user'.

They requested their account deleted. I deleted it.

The article is entirely confusing. The web is intrinsically 'small' - anyone can register a domain name and run a server. And link to Github, arguably more 'big' than 'Big Web' as defined in the article. iOS apps? Centralising around site.js?

Makes no sense.

As an independent owner of a few web properties, this provides a solution, and not much of a solution, to a problem that's entirely self-prescribed.

I also noted, as there's nothing like a needle in a haystack, small-tech.org is registered via 1api.net, never heard of them before despite

> 1API GmbH is one of Europe's s leading domain name registrars and is recognized as a preeminent developer of world-class domain name platforms. 1API currently manages more than 3,000,000 Domains.

Yet Terms of Service notes

> Prices. The prices charged to you for the Services are published on the Website (“Pricing Schedule”) and are subject to modifications at 1API’s sole discretion. Unless otherwise specified, all amounts are stated herein are in Canadian Dollars.

German-Canadian registrar. Interesting.

> Come on now, "user" as in "computer user" was a term in use since long before the web.

The "computer user" term was true back then, but I am on board with Aral's definition. But now in today's world, those "computer users" are:

+ Addicted to social media whilst those companies control information and spread fake news.

+ Continuously pay for products like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon whilst those companies continue to 'recommend' you stuff you don't need.

+ Having companies spying on them and implementing dark UX patterns by A/B testing; all for sake of keeping you 'hooked' onto their products.

This type of behaviour can only be summed up as treating and addicting customers like drug users.

Aral's comparison is apt.

> Continuously pay for products like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon whilst those companies continue to 'recommend' you stuff you don't need.

> Having companies spying on them and implementing dark UX patterns by A/B testing; all for sake of keeping you 'hooked' onto their products.

This applies to all commercial products.

I completely disagree.

A vast majority of commercial products don't do anything in the way of recommending additional goods and services to their users. The sale of the original good or service would be the only profit-seeking component.

This is just not true, most companies try to make customers to come back, even if all they can do is put their logo and website on the packaging.

That don't care about your privacy.

I have never met or heard of a drug dealer calling their customers for users.

Even if that was the case, is "(drug) user" a nice term compared to what else is used - like addicts, fiends, junkie, tweaker, etc. It kind of recognize the agency of addicts, instead of the dehumanisation following the other terms.

Yay. I wonder when someone will pop up on Github, demanding "user" to be renamed, because it's pejorative due to that context.

The 'addicting' aspect of what the tech companies have created and the behaviours they are willing to go to get their 'users' hooked is why the 'user' comparison to 'drug users' makes sense.

No it really doesn't. Are library users called users because the library preys of their patrons addiction to literature? This is a very weak wordgame, that at best muddies the point about tech companies.

There are multiple instances of tech companies exhibiting this 'drug user' behaviour on their customers, I am sure you don't have any examples for your false comparison.

You are not understanding the issue here. Nobody is saying that tech companies ain't doing bad things. Let's stop this argument, as we're are not having the same argument.

OK, So you have no examples then. Good.

Simmer down Kyle, and work on your reading comprehension.

Try to work on that false comparison of yours and come up with a better counter argument, you know you don't have any examples with your previous one.

>I have never met or heard of a drug dealer calling their customers for users.

I've never met one calling them customers or clients either, I don't know that they had any term for them.

>I've never met one calling them customers or clients

I didn't wrote that they did. Please read my comment again.

I didn't say that you did. Ditto.

The term "user" didn't become ubiquitous until after the people using the software were no longer "customers."

Implying that Silicon Valley borrowed this term from drug dealers is kind of silly, but the tech industry's adoption of this strange term does tie into the author's main point.

Furthermore, "user" doesn't imply addiction. I hung a picture the other day, I used a screwdriver to do it. I'm not addicted to screwdrivers or hanging pictures, I'm just a user of a tool.

Absolutely. I'm totally on board with what they're trying to do, sounds like a great idea, but

>The mass surveillance and factory farming of human beings on a global scale is the business model of people farmers like Facebook and Google. It is the primary driver of the socioeconomic system we call surveillance capitalism.

This puts me off right away. I probably partially agree, but this kind of simplistic resentment is just a turn-off for the service.

I’m not sure if I’m 100% sold on this. The service sounds like ( in their own terms ) “Big WEB” but the in a server that is... “owned”? By the user renting that server.

Honestly it just sounds like every other server farm out there. Rent a server, put your data on it, hope the service doesn’t go down and trust that the company isn’t selling your data behind your back.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea they propose. But mechanically, it seems to work like any other place.

Want to convince me? Make a service where I can rent my own server ( not just a portion of it ) and physically own it. Nobody, not even the provider, can access it without my explicit permission in written form ( email with digital signatures ).

Until then, this “Small Web” service just sounds like every other server provider out there.

I think it’s simpler. This smells like a load of marketing to justify the existence of another silo which is controlled by some form of vanity ideology.

Nope.

We still have plenty of choices which don’t need an ideology shipped with it. I’m good with a text editor, an open source OS and a VPS, colo or some hooky box under my desk hanging off my ADSL line. That’s the small web that isn’t consumed by some portalisation which is really the issue isn’t it which is not being solved here by trying to create another one?

Agreed, my 'Small Web' is a couple of Raspberry Pi plugged in to my router exposing services that are useful to me - the more I use it and the more tech news I read, the more I want to expand both the robustness and diversity of my personal services.

Have you written about that somewhere? What kinds of services do you run yourself?

I'm afraid not - it's nothing particularly exotic, mostly Home Assistant, Pi Hole and Bitwarden password manager.

Next thing I want to add is a bookmark manager - then perhaps some kind of storage solution.

I didn't get to that point in the article, but seriously for all the paragraphs I read I thought they were just making software that I could run in my old laptop at home acting as a web-server, or a Peer-to-Peer browser-based thingy. /sighs. Well not the first time I read a cleverly disguised infomercial that eats its tail.

On a more positive note, running stuffs in my old laptop at home has proven a great way to keep connected with friends without the surveillance. But I don't see a neat way to pack the technical knowledge I used for that for people without technical knowledge... if you don't update your own setup, you have either to have a friend or friendly technician who does it, or trust Corp to push updates remotely to your home-whatever, which is just as bad as using Corp servers directly. I think that the only way out of the conundrum is technical literacy for everybody.

Have you heard of FreedomBox? I’d like to start experimenting with it sometime since I’m only semi-technical.

Also there’s a cool project called CoBox [cobox.cloud] which I found recently, which is creating open source distributed software for a cooperatively run Dropbox alternative - you can effectively build a completely self-sovereign distributed network with friends (or with yourself).

I don't get it, isn't it already easy to run your own server in a closet at home? You need a static IP (which is still very common, and getting easier with IPv6) and a linux box that is always plugged in.

It's less convenient that renting a VM or VPS somewhere and that is again less convenient than a fully managed web presence, but you can do it.

Aral is trying to make this process easier [0]

[0] https://sitejs.org/

> Make a service where I can rent my own server ( not just a portion of it ) and physically own it.

So, a dedicated server? Of course, you still have to trust the provider not to access it, but the only time I know they've accessed it is when I scheduled a replacement for a faulty hard drive. I was able to schedule that access for my convenience (so that I could rebuild RAID after replacement) and they had my permission to do so.

I don't see how this is opposed to their project, though I don't fully understand the difference between running Site.js + Hugo versus just Hugo.

This is the same guy who ran that complete shambles of a vapourware project a few years back to build a smartphone right?

This sounds exactly the same in that it's some vanity project under the guise of being indie or privacy focused but all he's really looking for is some more cash.

I'd probably continue to steer well clear.

Yes steer well clear of this guy. I can’t remember the details as it was long ago but I distinctly remember him being lambasted by the design/dev community.

EDIT: Not to leave HN readers hanging and to back up my comment...

He raised $100,000 on Kickstarter back in 2014 to build a "privacy" focused phone. One month later he took the phone off the table due to "lack of resources". Needless to say the phone never materialised.

https://gigaom.com/2015/01/13/ind-ie-scales-back-focuses-on-...

Even Heartbeat was a stunning failure. I had high hopes for this guy but he had a contradictory exception towards accepting Apple and their stance on 'privacy' at the time.

Both him and his wife are all in on this utopian small-web privacy idea and they detest attending conferences with FAANMG sponsorship. However, his wife recently attended a design conference sponsored by Facebook, Twitter and Google. [0]

He'll probably instantly block you if you brought this up or spin the story.

[0] https://www.framer.com/loupe/2019/

C'mon, Aral Balkan is well known expert and activist, he's not just "some guy". He's been in and around web-standards development for decades, involved in W3C standards' groups, and very vocal pushing for better accessibility, privacy, worker and human rights in IT, etc. You can accuse him of being a lot of things (overzealous for one), but I don't think he's ever been "just for some more cash" type of person.

> very vocal

That's a good enough summary.

So he failed a project, an idea and a huge one at that with every possibility to fail.

There are so many ways to get money, I fail to see this route as a cash-grabbing attempt.

I, for one, like his ideas and attempts at building something with meaning. Even if he fails at every single project, the ideas are here and that's good, I guess.

At least we're talking about it around something, not just words.

Try to find anything about any project he has done inbetween, somehow all those have disappeared off the internet too. Combine that with him at best ignoring, at worst publicly disparaging any other already existing project doing what he claims to do (over tiny perceived "faults", but at least those projects actually have working stuff), and it would be nice if he stuck to ideas and not even pretended to try anything. (His conference talks are surprisingly well-regarded, so if he gets people to think about this things - good)

I don’t know much about this guy, but I have seen tons of projects embark on this vision.

  Matrix.org
  Mastodon
  Scuttlebutt
  Solid

We began back in 2011 and have our own version, that lets anyone host their own social network as easily as Wordpress powers blogs. That’s the goal, anyway. Here are the economics:

https://qbix.com/token

Feedback is welcome!

Also

  Urbit

My impression of Aral was that he was a startup founder but in the FOSS / Privacy world. He stood out for that reason. I saw him talk at a very small conference in the UK and he seemed to be genuine and believed what he said.

In other words startup founders evangelise to attract attention to grow fast and to try to get lots of VC funding. FOSS / privacy folks are more humble and quieter so it's very rare to find the loud enthusiasm more common to be found in the valley. Often there is no need to sell the idea and to stoke the hype up when it comes to volunteer organised open source projects. FOSS people tend to be in it for different reasons, in it for the long haul, or in it even if no one is interested.

The risk with any startup founder is that to be "lean" they have to be able to drop their products at a moments notice to try another one. The Small Web idea seems to be an minimum viable product idea and like any idea isn't without value but its possible that it might be more risky to invest time into it compared to a traditional open source idea? (or is it, maybe it will get more interest...)

Appropriate all the good values and ideas from https://indieweb.org/, re-heat it add some feel-good word salad and we have this "Small Web".

Yes, by all means let's get back to a more decentralized and distributed web. But providing a service where you are still hosting your site on someone else's servers and on someone else's domain and calling for values is just digital green-washing.

Not to mention how IndieWeb sites already provide way more interoperability than any of these site.js things, while not being beholden to a single stack with a single design philosophy (or an asinine requirement that every site be run as a single tenant on a dedicated server).

Plus, some of us already have post privacy, allowing access via other IndieWeb identities -- as well as making the allowances for people to log in without having to run their own damn website.

IndieWeb principles are based on modularity, communication, community, and compassion. None of those are things I'm getting from Aral's latest vanity project.

... and forget to mention Indieweb. Another all-in-one solution compatible with Indieweb and Fediverse tech, with optional hosting as a service, would be a great project to that goal, and an addition to the ecosystems. But no, has to be its own thing.

This 'indieweb' was sponsored by Google, hardly going to be in line with the goals of Aral's 'Small Web'.

It makes no sense to turn this into a purity contest. "a company once provided a room for an event", "they provide service credits for all open-source projects that apply" or something like that does not invalidate a movement. In the same way that I don't support going through the sponsor lists of the events Aral talks at to call him a hypocrite - as long as it is peripheral it's sometimes hard to avoid and sometimes very useful support you can grab without any commitments.

If this was a mistake and they have changed their mind, sure. If not, (even when warned) it shows they don't have any principles, You won't catch Richard Stallman or anyone rightfully for privacy rights at such an event would you?

I would definitely be suspect and would actively call out privacy conferences being hosted and invited by surveillance capitalists.

You seem to be under the impression that IndieWeb is a formalized organization where the people operating under its banner are being paid by said organization.

In reality it's a set of shared goals, which a lot of the people disagree on facets of implementation and the like, and a collection of generally-agreed-to protocols that people can choose to support as part of interoperability with other websites.

I am fairly active in IndieWeb spaces and I disagree with others in these spaces all the time. I've also certainly never accepted any Google money (or any other sponsor) for my contributions, not that it's even been offered. This is the first I'm hearing of "us" being sponsored by Google.

I've seen plenty of material support from Mozilla (because there are several Mozillians involved in the projects) and Okta (for the same reason). But those aren't in any way signs that those companies are steering the decisions being made -- they're just offering things like hosting rooms and providing food at our mini-conferences and providing t-shirts and whatever (and those t-shirts, as far as I know, never have any sponsor logos on them).

Also, we take a more user-centric view of things; while we'd all like people to be on their own self-hosted websites and free of the big social networks and so on, we understand that it's not realistic to just ask everyone to jump ship all at once, and running your own web presence is not what most people want to do. It's much better to build bridges so that people can connect in whatever way works for them, and that's why there are services like brid.gy and so on which people run out of the kindness of their hearts, and paid services like micro.blog that try to make it easier for people to dive in without having to Do All The Things, and people who work on IndieWeb integrations for Wordpress and so on.

And I'm very grateful for things like brid.gy; most of the comments/responses I get on my website come in through that, via people on Twitter and Mastodon and occasionally Reddit. Sometimes I get webmentions from other IndieWeb users, but they're the vast minority. And same goes for private-post logins; most people log in via Twitter or Mastodon, and a bunch use my email-based login mechanism as well, and very few actually log in via IndieAuth. If I were to restrict my interactions to pure IndieWeb I'd have a very lonely presence.

Quick, let's drop every open source project that had any kind of contribution from Google because every thing done by a trillion-dollar company does is evil and mere relationship with them implies you are compromised.

Who said drop them?

I guess, my https://wordsandbuttons.online/ qualifies as a small web site. However, it was built in a very contradictory manner. I would like to challenge this: "It must be done in a manner that does not require any technical know-how whatsoever".

It doesn't take too much technical know-how to build a site. Basic HTML+CSS+JS is enough really. Writing, editing, visual design, UI design, - it all requires way too much expertise in comparison. You have to be a creative let's say 80% of the time and technical for about 20%. Reducing the last 20% only wins you 20% of the effort. But! by concentrating the technical expertise in your own head you get another level of freedom as a creative person too.

I was writing on Livejournal, habrahabr, Codrspace, and Medium before I went stand-alone. And the main reason was not ideological but rather practical. I wanted to make interactive illustrations, quizzes, and puzzles for my pages. I wanted very specific very custom things no platform would provide.

And that's why I went small web. Small web but full tech. I enjoy my creative freedom by employing let it be modest technical expertise but exactly in a way I want to employ it. And I think, investing into technical skills to get creative freedom is well worth it.

Coining up a new catchy term while simultaneously trying to sell your new and shiny thing rings all kind of alarm bells.

At least their software is "non-colonial" which is the 1st time I've seen this term applied to software.

Software has never been cheaper and easier to use. If anybody wants to put the smallest amount of effort they can do all this stuff.

Maybe people are smarter and know the Internet is a Dark Forest and maybe staying off it or within the confines of big forstresses is not such a bad idea.

What are they 'selling'?

Reading the article would clarify that.

Jeez, either they are high, or I am! What an unsubstantiated load claims.

> You hear a lot of talk about blockchains and proof of work but this is not what the Small Web is about. Having a billion copies of the same database is not decentralisation. That’s centralisation. If you have a billion people having [...] unique databases is decentralisation.

Really? This ignores the hard learned facts that, despite the claim that "on the Small Web, we distrust servers and trust clients", clients in reality can be malicious. Sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya does not prevent from attackers. Best case is, it slows them down, because they have to shake off the laughter first.

> Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web.

Well, that is obviously not true! The foundation of the web stems from military and academic origins. The open source movement is strong, Linux is the most used OS for servers. The list goes on.

The list of claims on could debunk is too long for my cup of coffee!

If that's what they refer to as vision, then count me out. I must be miles away from that level of "enlightenment"!

Just to make clear: I am all for people hosting there blogs and webpages themselves. Medium is awful, blogger does not even load with the browser plugins that I use. I am all for distrusting servers, using uBlock Origin, uMatrix, a big hosts file and your brain are good first steps. But I also am all for distrusting the client. What I can't stand is blog posts like these, throwing around half-truths, claims, and unreflected ideology for the purpose of money (they want donations) and publicity (they want donations). \s

> Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web.

> Well, that is obviously not true!

While I don't agree with the absolutist all, he's talking about the majority:

+ Tensorflow (Google)

+ Chrome Dev Tools (Google)

+ Pytorch (Facebook)

+ Kubernetes (Google)

+ Flutter (Google)

+ Xcode (Apple)

+ Visual Studio Code (Microsoft)

+ React (Facebook)

+ Angular

+ And so on.

All have room for embedding analytics and spying on it's 'users'.

clients in reality can be malicious.

I don't think it's talking about malice, just picking which side's use-cases get prioritized. https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology The server doesn't own the data.

Here are my suggestions for keeping the "small web" of the 90:s alive:

* If self-hosting on a server in your home isn't feasible, find a reputable mom-n-pop web hotel and support them with your money.

* Focus on making your site as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, regardless of where in the world they are and what hardware they're on. Don't use javascript and databases where static HTML will suffice.

* Don't skimp on links to other "small web" pages.

In the era of 5G, massive storage and incredibly powerful CPUs, we really should be exploring the home server space, as it has scope for huge improvements in terms of enabling non-technical people to own their data and operate 'servers'. This would actually realise the dream of a distributed network of full-fledged peers and also put tremendous power in the hands of ordinary people.

I am not sure non-technical people have any desire to "operate 'servers'". Not sure about their desire to own data, either…

Having other people operate servers for you is very convenient, even for very technical people.

For example you could host your own mail server for personal email but almost nobody does that. It's a lot of work and you can get better server for free.

5G and IPv6 (which does not require NAT).

I think another major area of research for many years has been content-oriented networking.

I see many ideas addressing the same problems from different angles. To me it's a question of which ones are going to become popular and when.

I mean things like IPFS are already popular to a limited extent.

There are home server startups or products out there. Most are just not super popular yet.

You're assuming that ISPs are okay with you hosting a public service using their infrastructure, which they're historically very much opposed to (in order to get you to pay for a more expensive "business" account).

Mine doesn’t give a crap if my outbound is 200 gig a month uploading stuff to onedrive or iCloud. Why should it have that opinion on anything else? I’m paying for a pipe. The only control metric they have is asymmetry and that’s a technology tradeoff in my case (ADSL)

Oh I completely agree with you that they shouldn't care, but the odds are big that you'll find out that they do in your Terms of Service.

I never had issues running public http servers on residential isp connections. It's fine unless you get massive traffic.

Dude screw ISPs. Mesh networking will power the last mile soon.

It's not clear what this "Small Web" gives users instead of simply running a WordPress installation on a VPS or a shared hosting plan. In fact, the "Small Web" command line installation instructions on the accompanying site.js website are considerably more complicated that the easy one-click installation process widely available for WordPress. This suggests the "Small Web" will appeal only to technically savvy users rather than appeal to a wider audience.

WordPress, regardless of whether you like it or not, gives you an easy GUI for editing your website and a wide choice of plug-ins and themes. The "Small Web" with it's accompanying site.js website ("small web construction set") is more complicated and appears to offer less but dressed up in language to make it sound new and unique.

This is possibly the only criticism I have with Site.js, but I do wish Aral can build around a GUI for his command line tool.

But agreed, something like Ghost or Wordpress looks and is more easier than Site.js

Also "Rediscovering the Small Web": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326329

Whenever I have an idea where the goal is to decentralize and yet somehow I want the achievement of that goal to coalesce around myself then it's time to ask the question: is this not simply centralized on ego instead of a platform?

I think one of the greatest problems with achieving decentralized anything is that the egos that might make it happen cannot be satisfied because a really decentralized system should refuse to coalesce around any individual component, person or platform.

I think this is a good idea and I think making it easy for people to host their own services is valuable. [0]

It’s also been tried a few times with little success (sandstorm.io).

I think the problem is deeper, modern infrastructure is messy to run, it’s hard to configure, and every thing has to be specifically tweaked to work. Something that works for regular users will require extensive tooling to be useful and will need that tooling for every application and use case.

I think Urbit is probably the best long term bet (old blog post, but gets the idea across): https://urbit.org/blog/magic/

A more recent one: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/

Urbit abstracts away the p2p complexity so in the future users can used decentralized applications built on the platform without having to even know they’re decentralized. I think this is the only way this kind of thing can work at scale for regular users.

[0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

With respect, the blog post you pointed to is a load of self-referential blather, when I go to the top of urbit.org I can't see anything because my browser blocks content hosted on google, this project evidently doesn't even try to walk its talk.

You might find the explanation here more helpful: http://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/

The project website isn't trying to be decentralized, it's trying to share information easily with people using existing services.

Oh god no. Urbit is not less complex or easier. It's piling on all kinds of extra superfluous nonsense in service of an ideological project, not for technical reasons.

As long as a complex system has the complexity abstracted away it can still be simple for users.

The modern (non-Urbit) tech stack is extremely complex, but a lot of that (though not enough) is hidden from the end user.

In a lot of important ways the Urbit stack is a lot less complex than the existing modern tech stack, but it’s still early on and the abstraction for regular users is still in progress. Being less complex than the modern tech stack (by designing from the feet up by first principles) is one of the main reasons the project exists.

It’s just rarely done anymore in modern computing. It happened more in the 60s-70s when people would experiment.

I understand the skepticism - I think it’s a cool project, but there’s still work to do before it’ll win over average users.

Luckily the project is invested in long-term planning and design (with solid short term execution and feature shipping/iteration) so it’s improving quickly.

Urbit stack is ~30k lines of code, that's low enough to be grasped by a single person. What's hard is learning form scratch completely new platform, but that's deliberate and is not such a problem if it manages to deliver what it promises.

Somehow I feel that accusations of being ideological come from people, who themselves are ideologically oposed to Yarvins work and fail to consider Urbits network protocol purely for its properties. Idea of giving network addresses value, cryptographic ownership and creating a hierarchy of addresses resembling functionality on the network (users, ISPs, etc.) seems perfectly resonable.

From the last time this came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156

> the core of the whole system (the Nock language) has "loobeans" instead of booleans in which 1 represents false and 0 represents true at which point I nope'd out pretty hard.

>> Being contrarian is not the same as being clever, and this is very much not clever.

Yeah, no disagreement from me there. That bit is dumb and he admitted it was a mistake to do that.

It doesn’t mean that everything is bad.

I was skeptical initially too, but was curious enough to check it out. I was surprised when I did.

It's a small community and product is still in pre-widespread adoption stage (though far enough along to be useful for people to play with): https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/

My quick overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397725

Also (not excusing the bad design) 0 is often the success error code in Unix for the shell and 1 or something else is often error.

So it’s not entirely without precedent, but it’s still an unnecessary and confusing inversion for true and false.

Do you think this convention would be that hard to get used to, so that the whole system should be disuqallified?

Urbit is extremely cryptic but I do like the idea as long as they don't include any 'blockchain' nonsense.

Bad news for you: https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-and-the-blockchain/

Urbit is now not a good alternative to decentralized applications.

The blockchain is only used for handling the IDs, but the core project functionality does not rely on a blockchain beyond that.

> Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web. They are optimised for creating Big Tech and the Big Web.

What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody forces you to host your personal website on a k8s cluster.

> While we can repurpose some of them for our own uses, we also need tools specifically optimised for building single-tenant web applications and the Small Web.

How about Apache for local testing and a ftp server to a webspace at [INSERT WEBHOSTING COMPANY HERE]. Existed for decades, well tested and easy to use.

> What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody forces you to host your personal website on a k8s cluster.

But he is right, almost all the dev tools we used are by surveillance capitalists only further entrenching our reliance on them, think React, Pytorch, React Native, or even K8S etc.

These tools only benefit the the big tech companies and we are going down a path of no return.

> How about Apache for local testing and a ftp server to a webspace at [INSERT WEBHOSTING COMPANY HERE]. Existed for decades, well tested and easy to use.

This is way too technical for most people, Aral is building something everyone can use in a few steps and has privacy built in.

> But he is right, almost all the dev tools we used are by surveillance capitalists only further entrenching our reliance on them, think React, Pytorch, React Native, or even K8S etc.

What? The source of all these things is open. I do not rely on any of these companies when using these tools now. Of course if I use them in conjunction with their cloud services I am dependent on say Amazon or Google. But the open nature of their software provides me with everything I need to use it without the dependence on said companies. Your critique is mostly blind, unbalanced tribalism.

> These tools only benefit the the big tech companies and we are going down a path of no return.

No they are free to everyone. You could use them for whatever you like.

> This is way too technical for most people, Aral is building something everyone can use in a few steps and has privacy built in.

Frankly, if you are unable to use FTP and XAMPP I don't see you using npm and the CLI.

I've seen so many tools made by these companies which were advertised as 'free' turn towards a cloud based model, deprecated, restricted by a patent clause or the ecosystem and development is beholden to a single corporation.

The cloud services is just the start.

Had me right up until the advertising.

But let's focus on the first chunk shall we? Yes, wholeheartedly agree. Host it yourself if you can, host it with a small ISP if you can't. It's necessary to keep the open Internet alive and prevent us falling back in to the walled gardens of compuserve, AOL, etc. We're almost there already with our reliance on Google Search driving caged "standards" like AMP.

Same here, I was quite interested in the first part. That being said, it was already annoying me because it felt like it was just about choosing A (big tech) or B (self hosted) which were basically the same thing, but for some reason people choose A. It's not the same thing, people choose A because most of them are not skilled enough to get B.

And that's probably a mistake to not make it crystal clear - at the same time that we make crystal clear that yes, anybody can acquire those skills. Most people learn to drive a car. This is incredibly difficult! They learn to read and write, some can even do it in several languages! Why should they not be able to learn to write html and upload it?

If we make people think freedom and democracy should come cheap and convenient, we'll just fall into the same trap with some entities building cheap and easy things and getting control over everyone.

My problem with all these similar privacy-oriented services is that they're basically saying: "Don't trust others, trust us". And, OK, Aral Balkan is a well-known figure so I probably would trust him on a word, but I'd much more prefer to have a way to truly, physically have a full control of the sites and the data. I can do that now by having a server under my desk, but most of people can't. For that to become available to the wider public we'll need something more innovative than just updating EULA on 3rd party hosting services to be more privacy friendly. Not that it's bad, it's better than nothing, but I'd really like if we could move the focus more into the direction of p2p web or coming up with something new, even better.

>Another fundamental difference between the Big Web and Small Web is that on the Big Web we trust servers and distrust clients whereas on the Small Web, we distrust servers and trust clients.

I'm less and less sure about that. Clients are increasingly becoming prisons run and owned by BigCorps, iOS being an extreme example of that. Taking ownership is fittingly called jailbreaking.

I think the whole client/server distinction isn't that useful. The important question is who controls what.

The granularity of delegating power is crucial, because completely opting out of BigCorp offerings is something only tech experts can do.

Consumers need to be able to mix and match, and not have everything follow from some initial choice they get to make once every few years at best.

I'm entirely for "the small web" but we should be aware that it's difficult to be as energy efficient when running single-tenant servers than a megacorp for whom every penny saved per user results in millions of dollars in savings.

Ah, I've read further, and there comes the sales pitch, they're building something.. Thing is, everyone can go out today, buy a raspberry pi and get a server online in a few hours.. I don't think this is a problem that should be solved with MORE tools, I think it is one that should be solved with less tools.

A pi, nginx and a text editor is really all you need to make a nice home for yourself on the web.

Privacy and freedom of speech are threatened by INFRASTRUCTURE, not domains or tools. You can lose your freedom of speech because your hosting or your DNS/CDN provider terminates you (CloudFlare anyone?). That is the big web he is referring to. But I fail to see how his technological response addresses his concerns: TheSmallWeb offers no way to replace the current hosting mechanism, which is the single source of threat your website can currently suffer.

I'm all in for the small web. I have my own personal site for my content[0]. But the writer misses the huge point for the "big web": network. It is hard or even impossible to get traction for the small web. But posting on facebook? huge traction.

But it goes for anything really. Writing a technical blog? post on Medium or on dev.to or whatever is hyped right now to get traction.

This is the real problem here.

[0] https://snir.dev

Would a "small web" require giving up search, recommendation engines, upvotes, etc. Doesn't something like hn necessarily require centralization?

I think HN is still small web. It's custom-written by one or a few people, doesn't make money, isn't trying to take over the world.

Uhm... It's run by Y Combinator. I wouldn't call that, not making money and not trying to take over the world, on the contrary. Traditional seed vc money firm.

It has "users" and they "rent" space on their servers and you don't own your data and it is censored and your activity can be mined - I think these are the main factors the article is interested in.

HN is owned by Y Combinator which funds surveillance capitalist startups, so absolutely not.

You could host your own HN/Reddit and get most if not all of the same features.

A true small Web would need to drop the isp provider since they can take down access on a simple take down notice. And run the server yourself.

So, antenna hooked up so that anyone in its perimeter can network. Then whoever can catch the signal may forward/repeat it, extending this small Web.

Afaik long range signals are highly regulated. There is no small Web possible yet.

Hey that's cool you're trying to bring back the "homepage". Don't go overboard with the vision and just execute on what we all know already makes sense.

Neocities, tilde.club?

cosmic.voyage!

Aral is in this for the long term and I respect his principles. Those accusing him of his past 'failed' endeavours are part of the problem. He is self funding his goals and has been ever since, not taking money from surveillance and vulture capitalists.

He was critical on Mozilla taking money from Google, and calls out privacy conferences taking money from Google, Facebook and Palantir.

Aral is following in the very footsteps of another respected privacy advocate, Richard Stallman.

Please take the time to read (or even donate [0]) to the Small Technology Foundation [1]

[0] https://small-tech.org/fund-us/

[1] https://small-tech.org

I practice small web since 1998.

MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_REQUIRED_TLS_FEATURE_MISSING ?

I agree with the sentiment of the writer. Unfortunately I don't see much of a solution offered in the statement.

The biggest obstacle is not only eas of use. Companies as FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google etc solve also other problems, they also select and filter information for you. They don't do it flawlessly, but still do quit a good job. One so far nobody else offers, because they are first movers in the space and now own the biggest networks.

Unfortunately their big centralized systems also creates the danger that comes with any big centralized source of information. There are always people that want it to put to good use for noble goals. And as it the human condition all power corrupts.

So in my opinion it is never good to concentrate too much power in the hands of too few people. It does not really matter if it is big government or big business. It will always start working for conformity and limit free speech.

We already see this totalitarian nature in the censorship around Covid information. It started as a way to surpress legitimate misinformation. But it is now actually preventing and surpressing new research that challanges current medical dogmas. Big tech, is like big government. It just does not work that well, is risk averse and is favouring stability over inovation.

The question then is, how can we revitalize the old decentralized web ideal, with all it's free information published for all individuals? The old web only solved standardization of content with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It did not solve relationships and privacy between people.

Now has the time come to work on standards that connect people. To build networks of friends and to build trust networks like all social media now already does.

Technology is also still improving. While all people can't type more stories, they only have each aimited amount of time for doing that, computers keep getting faster and faster, storage is keep getting cheaper and cheaper. So computer power is becoming a commodity with less and less value. Every day, it gets easier and cheaper to host data and search it.

Web space is cheap, so take Twitter, is it really that hard to publish a Twitter feed in a JSON file, use encryption to allow friends access to your feed data and publish that all on your own rented space that you fully control? Is it that hard to rank your own friends tweets in your own feed that runs on your rented computer power?

Advertisment as financing the computer rent is an option as well. Third parties can build services on top of the standardized data sets. Except that they can not lock you in, as it is your data. They just unlock it by providing search and filtering services while also include ads to make some bucks.

This open technology could also benefit existing alternative social networks, because it creates the needed network effect they need. Because by letting smaller parties work together without even knowing or agreeing with each other. Nobody controlls the network as everybody owns his own dataset. But can still connect to all other people who use the same data standard.

What is keeping us from building something like this? What am I missing?

Hey all,

Just skimmed the comments (I know, I know, never read the comments) but here are couple of facts in case you care about that sort of thing (but please don’t let these get in the way of a lively discussion) ;)

  - re: drug dealers/users, see: analogy

  - Yes, six years ago, we thought we could fix the problem with a phone. Then we started working on the problem and realised we couldn’t possibly raise enough money to do so, then we did a crowdfunding campaign that never included the phone (we promised the alpha of an initial peer-to-peer Mac-based social networking client and promised to keep working on the problem, both of which we delivered on). Also, anyone who asked for a refund from the crowdfunding for any reason got one. If I could do it again, we wouldn’t have held the crowdfunding and I wouldn’t have started on Mac. But this was all part of the process of us learning about the problem.

  - It wasn’t on Kick Starter, we built our own crowdfunding system because I wasn’t happy with how Kick Starter, etc., were gathering data (we didn’t want your privacy violated for trying to support us)

  - Since then, I’ve sold the three family homes we had (apartments in Turkey, total worth about ~€200,000 or so) and we’ve kept working on the same problem for the past six/seven years with the the initial crowdfunding + those funds + sales of our tracker blocker (Better Blocker) on Mac/iOS + professional speaking fees when we speak at conferences, etc. + donations to our not-for-profit (which basically pay our hosting fees every month).

  - Unless IndieWeb is suddenly about building single-tenant web nodes as part of a peer-to-peer future / topologically decentralised Web for everyday people, I don’t see how it’s the same as Small Web. If that is what they’re about now, then sure but, last I checked, they thought we were deranged zealots for publicly calling out Google, Facebook, etc., for being surveillance capitalists. 

  - Re: not having done anything since: we created Better Blocker, I personally spoke at over 50 events to raise awareness of the issue, including three times at the European Parliament, I spearheaded the creation of progressive tech policy at one of Europe’s most progressive political movements, and we worked with the City of Ghent on evolving what is now Site.js and the Small Web initiative.

  - Finally, someone mentioned that some “privacy projects” say “Don't trust others, trust us.” If anyone tells you that, don’t trust them. We know how to, can, should be (and are) building technology where you don’t have to trust us.

Also, PS:

Small Web is not about having your own Static Web page or having yet another tool for geeks. It’s not about going back to the 90s (been there, was fun, wouldn’t want to go back), it’s about taking the best of that ethos and implementing it for 2020 and beyond. Right now, I’m trying to build a tool for developers (including us) so that we can use it to build everything things for everyday people that don’t require a Faustian pact to give up your privacy, freedom of speech, or your personhood to use.

Whether or not this “succeeds”, who knows? But we’re sharing everything we make under AGPL and trying to share every brick in this bridge we’re trying to build between where we are (the sewer that is surveillance capitalism) and where we want to be in hopes that if the stuff we build doesn’t work, at least others can use the tools to build other solutions.

Here’s a recent talk if you’d like to learn more about what we’re working on:

https://small-tech.org/videos/eastern-partnership-civil-soci...

You don’t have to like what we do and you definitely don’t have to like me but I do hope that you will consider the ideas (and ideals) we’re working towards.

One of the cute things is, that I like Aral. I do, ever since he got mad at PayPal. I like him because he has been steadfast at this while many of the others that started to bang on this problem when it just appeared (2006/7/8) either joined the armies of Mordor .. (Chris Messina?) Or got tired... Distracted.. or are still fighting the fight from the sidelines (Evan Prodromou, Blaine Cook, such lovely people!). So many have just disappeared.

Yeah, his self-aggrandizing can be tiresome. He does sound like a one person cult from time to time. But he has been tireless in saying the one important thing "This fight can be won. Don't let up. It is worth fighting". And that in itself is worth our respect.

Now, I have long come to the conclusion that there are no technical solutions to this. Only political ones. In the sense that at the micro level we need to create the movement of people that care. At the macro level we need to elect the people that pass the laws that break the megacorps or make them into public utilities. It doesn't mean we stop working on the software infrastructure to combat the Evil empire(s). But software alone won't cut it.

Now Aral is not useless on those tlfights either. He keeps talking about them, and talks well.

So, will Site.js make any dent in anything? Quite obviously not. Personally, technically, most of it makes me cringe quite violently.

Could it have had a better chance if Aral was "nicer", humbler, at a bit better at coalition building? Probably.

At any rate, Aral, not being "nice" is no reason to be nasty yourself.

Best of luck Aral, keep up the fight, and thank you for your service.

Aral: you go rounds and rounds to reinvent ideas that are solved, and it's been like this for years.

You could join any ActivityPub based project; even start one; build a Matrix client with a web frontent; dig into Scuttlebutt; start working with Beaker on dat://. Any of these choices are better, than starting yet another approach from scratch and wasting a lot of time and effort on it.

Now, for the other issue: please don't try to coin new term that is confusing to everyone. For example, there was a brilliant essay recently - https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/ - which used the same "small web" phrase in a very different context. This is just the tip of the iceberg with the problem of using something this generic.

"solved" is overstating it, but are already being worked on by groups that have made good progress and a working base, and will continue to make progress.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, was HN always this nasty?

I think tooling around this idea makes sense and I hope you succeed.

I wrote a little allegorical story about this which you might like: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

I think it's a hard problem and it's exciting to see multiple projects trying to make this better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269016

> was HN always this nasty

Yes, and that's good. We need harsh places.

Critical and constructive is one thing, but the HN commentary seems to be trending critical and dumb.

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