What is the small web? (2020) | Hacker News Reader

What is the small web? (2020)

ar.al

146 pointsacqbu123 comments

I generally agree with this article, but ...

Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you.

I feel like people forgot that shared hosting exists (e.g. Dreamhost, or Nearly Free Speech).

One computer can serve tons of websites! It can serve multiple Hacker News spikes at once. And the site doesn't even need to be in a virtual machine or container.

This is how "LAMP" / PHP works! But these days it works with Python too. Either way it's perfect for static and JS-only sites.

A single computer is often more reliable than a cloud. The cloud has single points of failure that are less reliable than a commodity machine.

----

I mentioned that here:

What's the Fastest Way To Get a Page on the Web?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254006

http://www.oilshell.org/share/question.html

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/12/backlog-assess.html#wha...

I think the problem is that shared hosting has a shell interface (this used to be a desirable feature!!). And many users no longer know shell. Hopefully we can make it easier to learn!

Containerization solves 99% of those problems and more, such as not having to worry about conflicting dependencies, share of common resources, etc.

I would say shared hosting is now more popular than ever, with a twist: similar to the shift that has happened from multi-user mainframes to personal computers to ubiquitous computing (ie individuals having multiple computers), self-hosters are also now hosting not one but many websites/apps per server.

I am not sure how the status quo is different from your suggestion, or rather, how your suggestion is an improvement over that?

The original post is talking about static sites: https://sitejs.org/

And mentions a VPS:

Sync and deploy to your own VPS.

I shouldn't have brought up LAMP / PHP, because that confuses the issue.

The point is that you should not use a VPS to serve static content! You will not do as good a job as maintaining the OS and web server as a professional. Just use shared hosting!

You can also use Github Pages or whatnot, but that goes against the philosophy of centralized cloud providers.

Commodity shared hosting is very portable between providers, because it's just a Linux box, without "cloud" stuff. That's all you need for static pages. Use rsync or git.

This page looks really ugly but it will give you a sense of how many independent providers there are: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=4

> self-hosters are also now hosting not one but many websites/apps per server

When was this not the case? Self-hosters are generally more resource-constrained, and thus reusing hardware makes more sense. It was pretty common already 20 years ago.

My bad, I should have added "with ease" at the end of that sentence. It was not impossible of course, but I personally find easier now.

These days shared hosting with multiple tenants is more commonly known as "serverless". A bit of a misnomer since servers are involved, but it's the common term.

From what I understand, the term "serverless" is usually used for "on-demand pricing of computational resources (such as CPU, RAM, and bandwidth)."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing

Shared hosting is usually much more straightforward in many ways, including flat-rate pricing.

another thing I like is stuff like "lambda" where you can run a function instead of a whole server application for every api request! Wait, I think I've seen this before.

    functionname.cgi?param1=val&param2=val

(replace "cgi" with your favourite php/pl/py/cfm/whatever)

Differences between shared hosting and "serverless":

- Monthly or yearly billing vs hourly (as the sibling mentioned). I think my plan is $9/month or something, plus $16/year for domain name.

- Single server vs. multiple servers. AWS Lambda is great if you actually need to scale up, but you don't need that for serving a website. A single machine can serve hundreds of static websites.

- You can get commodity shared hosting from dozens of providers, but you can get serverless from only a few "big cloud" providers, which goes against the ethos of the small web. That's because writing and maintaining the custom software to scale up is a big undertaking.

The original post is talking about static websites. You don't need anything running on the server for this! So all you need is shared hosting, and you won't even use the PHP part.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29804920

Many people forgot about lamp stacks, or it really entered the wayside. Then again people push/deploy LEMUR stacks now. https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-the-lemur-stack-and-a...

But agree on people not knowing shell, even cloud shell on azure/aws - people like to touch things and really enjoy the UI for setting up networking rules, load balancers and more.

Still so much fun, cgi - php and apache in general, the mid 00's were an exciting time were you could do so many things. I enjoyed hosting a website on port 80 from my residential cable/roadrunner connection and editing live pages and seeing it reflect instantly (sure you could just do localhost, but back then even port 25 and such were open, easily letting you run your own mail server and more.)

But the fastest way to get a page on the web nowadays would be github pages, you can do it in less than 10 mins, but I guess if you have a server already imaged, you can do "sudo apt-get install lamp-server" and get started that way.

The LEMUR article you linked says:

> This blog post was published on April 1. That’s a huge hint ;-)

Not sure what to think about this...

The biggest problem with shared hosting is security. It's common for everyone's processes to run as the same "www-data" user. It can be made secure, but it isn't common and most shared hosting is powered by off-the-shelf piles of shit like cPanel which are Swiss cheese when it comes to security.

No I don't believe any shared hosting does this (at least not ones anybody pays money for). Dreamhost and Nearly Free Speech definitely don't.

This might have been true 20 years ago, but I doubt it was true 10 years ago, and definitely not today. Maybe some tiny universities had janky setups like this.

Fun fact: shared hosting providers maintained OS virtualization for Linux years before Docker existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ -- initial release 2005

I'm not quite sure but it also appears to have pre-dated cgroups. If you pack many users together on a server, you will want something like cgroups to prevent neighbors from DOS-ing each other.

This was a fork and wasn't in mainline Linux.

So they actually had MORE isolation than running as separate Unix users, not LESS.

(edit: I'm not sure exactly which shared hosting providers used such Linux kernel forks, but I'd be interested in anyone with direct knowledge. From using the shell on various shared hosting providers, I know they have pretty custom configurations with more isolation than stock distros.)

This page is a little fuzzy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company)

Nope, most shared hosting is still like the OP comment’s description.

Then of course you have companies like Cloudflare and Netlify where their shared static hosting is not the traditional lamp/cpanel stuff, and certainly have internally developed platforms/serving technologies where security and sandboxing is very likely top of mind.

Companies of Cloudflare and Netlify ilk are the exception, but most cheapo shared hosting (and shared hosting has to be cheap to compete), is still very much multi-tenant with security concerns across the board.

See this comment, it's probably only mod_php, which you don't need for serving static sites:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29804968

I've used 3 shared hosting providers, all of which provide SSH access. And when I ssh in, and type "ps", I see my own processes, not the processes of anybody else. They are running as a different user.

You can have unique SSH users and still have all the PHP code run under a shared user on the web server. The machine you SSH in is most likely not the same as the one running your PHP code even.

Years ago I worked at a small hosting company and avoiding this situation was definitely on our minds. There are a lot of approaches to it under eg. Apache: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/HTTPD/PrivilegeS...

My bet would be that most larger shared hosts have implemented some type of solution for this, but perhaps some smaller ones haven't.

Yeah so I use Python and FastCGI with Dreamhost, which runs as a separate process and separate user.

I think mod_php (Apache shared library) is the the thing where every PHP site runs as www-data, but I thought that FastCGI was preferred these days over mod_apache. FastCGI is a separate process, which can run as a separate user, communicating over sockets.

But the original post is about STATIC websites, so this won't come into play. The main point is that you shouldn't spin up a VPS to serve static sites! You'll be burdened with maintaining the OS and web server.

Shared hosting is basically as easy as Github pages, with more choice of provider (in keeping with the philosophy of the small web).

I can't imagine that the process level is an issue here – we're not talking military, do we?

Other than that, prefer zero-knowledge designs and you can often reduce to the danger of vandalism. Have a friendly hoster and/or backups for that case.

While not military, most websites handle some kind of personal data (even IP addresses count as such for GDPR purposes) and a large chunk of the world has regulations that impose penalties or at the very least requires disclosure (bad PR) for data breaches.

Considering how easy and relatively cheap it is to get your own dedicated bare-metal server, I don't see any reason to bother with shared hosting anymore.

do as you please, but none of my family could responsibly maintain a dedicated server.

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.

This doesn't seem like it's true. I feel like it came from the unix culture. Unless they got it from drug dealers...

This is so painfully bullshit. Imagine the scientists and engineers at bell labs thinking that the operators of their machines are akin to drug addicts.

The common quip is from the mid 90s, usually attributed to Edward Tufte but apparently the real source is "a guy from Wired":

> And o there is this incredible remark which a guy from Wired told me, that there are only two industries which refer to their customers as users, drugs and computers. "I've just got to have release 7.2", right!

[0] https://cryptome.org/jya/tufte.htm

Well they did start development in the 60’s, it wasn’t all pot and acid back then.

Oddly relevant to social media nowadays though.

"Users" was a common term for people at PCs in my early networking days (Novell, early '90s), so it's actually much older than the Web. We made jokes about it being the same term used for junkies, but we certainly never meant it in that context. The people who were "addicted" were the ones running the network; the users were happy to leave it all at the end of the day.

Back when computers were just a piece o your life. Video games the same. It was a corner in your room. Now it's both center an floor.

That's why I haven't bought a console in a decade! It's such a huge time sink when you add it all up; virtual chains that you wear willingly.

That's part of why the metaverse is such dystopian bullshit. Like I need my entire field of view taken away too, so Lord Zuck can sell more ads? Ew, gross, no.

Well the drug dealers were certainly there first, etymonline.com has this to say of "user": Of narcotics, from 1935; of computers, from 1967."

I am struggling to find a source for who first called users "users" back in 1967 - Actually I see it being used in the 1965 "Multics" papers [0] and the 1964 article in The Atlantic "Computers of Tomorrow" [1], as if it was already a term-of-art.

[0] https://multicians.org/history.html

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~traister/greenbf.html

OED gives the following usages, the first of which suggest users predate computers:

1950 Science 112 732/1 Analog machines..are enthusiastically supported by their users.

1959 E. M. McCormick Digital Computer Primer x. 139 The number of instructions which can be executed by a computer represents a compromise between the designer's and user's requirements.

Thanks for a good reference! It makes sense that "users of a service" or "user of a machine" slipped its way into computer jargon, no need to be coined or anything.

I'm tempted to pick up a copy of Digital Computer Primer on ebay, I love the old explanations of what these machines even are.

There’s a lot of ideology in that article that I find appealing… but then they tie it to specific tech in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Same reaction. At first I thought I was reading something about small websites and wresting control from centralized cloud and social media companies, and suddenly it turns into something about some JS package? Tangling with anything JS does not strike me as the simplest way to host your own small site.

at least they're not calling them 'lusers' as was so common back then

A 1996 definition and a 2003 version of that definition.

   151 "user" jargon "The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003)"
   user
   n.

1. Someone doing "real work" with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See {real user}.

2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See {luser}.

3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them.

The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and {luser}s. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as real winners.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context.

   .
   151 "user" foldoc "The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018)"
   user

1. <person> Someone doing "real work" with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions without thinking for two seconds or looking in the documentation. Someone who uses a program, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports {bugs} instead of just fixing them. See also {luser}, {real user}.

Users are looked down on by {hackers} to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. The term is relative: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context.

2. <jargon> Any person, organisation, process, device, program, {protocol}, or system which uses a service provided by others.

The term "{client}" (as in "{client-server}" systems) is rather more specific, usually implying two processes communicating via some protocol.

   [{Jargon File}]

   (1996-04-28)

.

The *.small-web.com thing rubs me the wrong way, going entirely against the stated purpose: https://you.small-web.com is only a little better than https://mega.corp/you, because you still don’t own your home. You do probably have more control of what goes there, but you’re still far too liable to be cut off with no recourse. You don’t actually control it. Just wait until people start hosting malware on small-web.com and the domain gets blacklisted, or when some error in curbing abuse takes you down as well, or when people abusing any free service provided becomes too much of a trial for the maintainers and they shut the whole project down. That’s what normally happens to these things, more than with some, though certainly not all, larger things (e.g. I’d depend on github.io not being shut down far more than small-web.com).

Step one in the Small Web must be to have your own domain name. Then you can migrate between hosting providers, host it on a Raspberry Pi in your garage if your home ISP allows such things, or whatever.

(I’m glossing over the fact that even when it’s https://your.site, as they include in one other illustration in the article, with the adjacent caption “on the Small Web, you own your own home”, you don’t own your home, but lease it—though so long as you pick a sensible TLD, keep paying, and don’t do anything particularly illegal in whatever jurisdictions are relevant, you’re very unlikely to lose it.)

This. I've been playing around with the same concepts, and owning your own domain is critical.

However, doing the domain registration dance is tricky for newbies. And, of course, it costs money. When presented with the choice between a Facebook Page (for free, immediate audience, etc) and a domain + website (costs money, no SEO, etc) it's very hard to persuade anyone that they should do this. Of course, we all understand that there are very good reasons for doing it the hard way, but it is still the hard way.

Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful.

> Maybe *.small-web.com is an intermediate step that is useful.

I pondered this before first posting, and decided that although I’m sympathetic to the reasoning I believe it’s a grave error of judgement, and that they should force people to use their own domains. Not only does it undermine their stated goals, but it makes them as a company or foundation more likely to fail since providing a domain will lead to significant abuse of their service if they offer any free service at all, including trial periods. (Newcomers to these sorts of industries tend to be surprised at how all-pervasive and varied abuse is, even of small players.) Requiring that people provide a domain would certainly turn away some potential customers/users that would perhaps have finished the job and moved to a domain of their own later, but it would also vastly reduce the burden of abuse.

And so I decided to use the word “must”, italicised, for practical reasons as well as ideological.

In their first phase, they’re even targeting tech-savvy people, who are less likely to “need” *.small-web.com.

because of this i have been eying the GNS (gnunet.org) project for quite some time. it's a p2p, decentralized, dns-replacement, also gnu

I would love to see this adapted widely, but as always, the established standards are good enough and any advantages resulting from using gnunet are not advantageous from a profit oriented point of view, so it would first need a killerapp to take off.

Exactly. Centralization. Single point of failure. Absurd.

I don't think advocating people make their entire website out of javascript, a very "big web" requirement, is smart. It just seems like they're doing so to promote their particular npm based product and cause centralization in it.

No. Small web is your own server, yes, but also your own HTML. Small web is when a webpage is a webpage and not an application that is impenetrably dense and non-modular and frankly too complex for most people to edit. Small web is a static site that doesn't have exploits, doesn't require package managers, and lasts forever. Anyone can, and did (back in the 90s) make simple functional websites that had text and images.

This site.js is not small web and I really hope he reconsiders pushing this on small web curious noobs who it will hurt.

I laughed out loud when I got to the "...and that's why we're pushing a new javascript framework" bit.

JS is the asphalt for the race-to-the-bottom of frontend fashion and maximizing engagements, i.e. "The Big Web". It is not required for small, functional websites, and indeed tends to make them less small and less functional/maintainable.

Yeah, and there's no cookies, privacy policies, legal terms, and so forth. There's just your web page. Simple and clean.

The privacy policies, legal terms, GDPR clickthroughs etc. all came about because everyone was already getting so evil with the cookies and tracking etc.

It’s nice to think they all cl appeared together as symptoms of Big Web but the truth is, the very early web that was built on trust and collaboration only lasted a blink of an eye before the bs starts to creep in.

SQLite author is an avid Tcl user and he recently introduced a small, secure and modern CGI based web application called wapp [1],[2]. I think this small web concept proposal is excellent fit for wapp.

Coincidently, a few days back there was an HN post on a novel backend-less web application using SQLite for off-line friendly apps [3]. Combination of small web and local-first software will probably a new killer feature of the Internet in the near future [4].

[1] Wapp - A Web-Application Framework for TCL:

https://wapp.tcl.tk/home

[2] EuroTcl2019: Wapp - A framework for web applications in Tcl (Richard Hipp):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgOlizq-Ms

[3] Using the SQLite-over-HTTP “hack” to make back end-less, offline-friendly apps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758613

[4] Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud:

https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf

Probably the same sentiment as many of the comments already present, but I haven't read all of them.

Don't people understand that the original Internet was/is built for exactly this(?); end to end connectivity between any two hosts. This is still mostly possible, but you do now have to get a public/routable ipv4 address. IPv6 gets back to the E2E ideal, without any overlay.

P2P systems from 20 years ago also solved this problem. For example hidden services on Tor, i2p, generic DHTs, etc.

Why people think we need to redo everything so that it works with JS and Blockchain boggles the mind. It's not corporate vs. individual as the seem to argue, it's just pro Blockchain, or pro Ethereum or something else.

This article seems to just be framing this same non-argument in a slightly different way. Get a static, public IP and run your microhttpd blog for pennies. Don't act like hosting it on an overcomplicated overengineed Blockchain network is going to decentalize the web. It's already decentralized, but nobody wants to go to your hidden service...

> Why people think we need to redo everything so that it works with JS and Blockchain boggles the mind.

Is this redoing it? I don' get that impression. It seems ther're just making it easy, as easy as installing an app and signing up for Facebook.

At uncharitable times I feel like the "small web" is about making a new hype machine around a certain ideology.

> P2P systems from 20 years ago also solved this problem. For example hidden services on Tor, i2p, generic DHTs, etc.

In addition it's easier than ever to get static IPv4 services or to setup a tiny VPS whose sole purpose is to offer a static IPv4 that routes traffic from/to computers on your LAN. Other than Tor hidden services, there's also tons of other internet software out there old and new for network connected devices to share messages like Email, Usenet, Bitmessage, UUCP, NNCP, Secure Scuttlebutt, IPFS, DAT, nostr, etc, etc.

> Site.js is now the easiest way to set up and run your own Owncast instance. This will install Owncast, set it up as a systemd service, and serve it securely at your hostname.

Unfortunately, 99.99% of people this is meant for, that are currently users of big web, have no idea what the two previous sentences mean.

That's why they said it's just for devs now. In the furure this should be as easy as installing a Facebook app and signing up for Facebook.

but hopefully leaving people not as clueless. But to not learn a thing seems to be part of the long-term promise. While short term they have to be devs.

I would like that the way round. Start with laypersons to begin with. That may not look high-tech, however. Hard to get tech-funding for such.

No. No no no no no.

This is not the solution to the problems we’re facing. While it’s nice to push people to run their own hardware and software, it does nothing to solve the problem of large corporations having large amounts of control and power with little regulation oversight.

We like to do this thing in tech where we try to solve all of our problems with engineering and software. What we’re encountering now is not something that can be solved with software: it’s a political and economic problem.

We have large corporations who have the power of small countries with little (if any) oversight on the stuff they build. Apple is attempting to scan users’ photos. Amazon is using software to exploit their workers and treat them like shit, and to stalk their users around the web into buying more shit. Facebook is giving teens eating disorders and trying to create a version of Instagram for children.

The problem we’re having now is fundamentally a political problem. We have to work together as a society, collectively instead of individually, to decide what the limits of these corporations should be. That happens through boring political processes and debates that nobody likes, which isn’t appealing to us programmers. But it’s the reality we face.

Individualistic ‘solutions’ like this only cause more harm because they don’t address the actual problems at hand. It’s like when Shell introduced the idea of the ‘carbon footprint’ to shift the conversation from us as a society holding corporations accountable to individuals being held accountable. The focus *must* be on political solutions to these problems, because there is no technical way this can be solved.

Appreciate your take on this. Those of us who wince at spending time in the Social Mess Halls may be inclined to build our personal curios in dusty corners of the net, content with a dozen views a month, but that does not serve as a rebellion to the problems in tech. There must be some better way we can think as groups of people, on necessarily large platforms. Something better than Dorsey and Zuck have managed to build.

I am very concerned about the metaverse trend, it's like people watched the Matrix and thought "yeah, let me plug into the machine and not deal with real life" and didn't catch the moral of Ready Player One, "Real Life is the only thing thats Real", but were sold on the nostalgia orgasm of having Jurrasic Park and Back to the Future in the same game.

I would like to build some anti-meta-verse, that helps you build the actual world by keeping your attention on your own intentions, not allowing your mind to wander at the whim of ad-campaign designers (we can all agree the IOI represented facebook, right? the bad guys that want to fill 80% of your peripheral vision with ads? but if it is more addictive then real life, of course people will choose to spend their time there.)

But there are technical ways this can be solved. Don't use their services is one.

I've got a lot of problems but you know what problems I don't have? Being censored and tracked by facebook and google. It really is very much an individual problem with individual solutions, though some may not like that fact because individual solutions don't accomplish their goals, it is still a fact.

Please read through my comment again. The “don’t use their services” line is another individualistic framing that exists solely to deflect blame from these large corporations.

Shell launched a PR campaign in the 90’s to popularize the term ‘carbon footprint’. This shifted the climate change conversation from large, multinational corporations needing to solve it to individuals, who have little-to-no power, needing to solve it. 71% of global CO2 emissions are emitted by just 100 companies. Even if every individual on Earth lowered their output by as much as possible, we’d all still be fucked because of the emissions by these corporations.

We must talk about corporate power in terms of policy, government, and collective responsibility. Individuals have no power in comparison to these large corporations. This is something we’ve observed in nearly every market these corporations compete in: if I had a dime for every company that tried to compete with Google Search and died over the years, I’d be really fucking rich. While their might be technical alternatives to these services, that doesn’t solve the problem of these corporations having unrestricted power to do whatever they want. That’s what we need to solve.

Please explain to me the path from individuals hosting their own Small Web apps to the mitigation of Amazon's power and prevalence in our lives. It's nice that you are off fb, I am too. But some number of individuals deciding not to use the platform does nothing when it is the way most people access the internet. People don't like this example because of its stereotypical user base, but remember what happened to parlor? That's what FAANG does, and will do, to individual small competitors unless their power is challenged in the political and economic arena.

If I don't use amazon, they have no power over me. They're background noise, like sally beauty salon. And consequently, the less people that use them the less power they have. It's easy to forget that their power isn't immutable, we give it to them.

That's idealistic thinking. Amazon does have power over people that don't use it. It influences national, state and local governments. Where it decides to open a distribution center has a huge impact on communities. It controls AWS, which is essentially the interstate highway system of the internet. You might not perceive the effects, but that doesn't mean it has no power over you. With Amazon the logistics and e-commerce juggernaut it is, there's really no meaningful alternative, and saying "just don't use it" is not very helpful.

I don't see how Site.js is any different than what he describes as "big web". So you create your own website and host it on a server. That's always been possible. What am I missing?

There’s a lot in that article that equates specific tech with ideology that I don’t think makes sense.

Look at the Great Leap Forward. Ideologues see everything which dares to disagree with them in even an aesthetic sense as ideological while the target wonders what the hell are they talking about. To be frank no matter how well educated they may be they are fundamentally complete idiots because of their insensitivity to reality.

I think "Big Web" is a profile hosted on "cloud infrastructure" owned by a company with public stock. Whereas "small web" is a website you build/create yourself and host on your own server?

But what is "your own server"? Yeah I host my personal site on my raspberry pi, but most people aren't going to do that. They're going to host on a server owned by a company with public stock.

It seems to me like one could market a device that isn't much more than a RPI that would download a container image from small-web-dot-registry that would run a webserver that encapsulates the site one authored on small-web-dot-com.

This image could have some smarts to either punch the right holes through the the router's firewall or do something even more clever with a peer-to-peer mesh network.

At the end of the day, what one would have is a website of their own that they control within their residence. It would foster a lot of this small web spirit and be very cheap to bring to market and maintain.

I'd buy that. But not because I need it. Web hosting is cheaper than Netflix.

This tracks with me until I consider the server/client rapport. As far as I can read into the author's intent, this dynamic does not change when someone hosts their own server.

If anything, the "dumb delivery mechanism" only became slightly more trustworthy?

They use the word big the same way people started saying Big Pharma. To put people selfhosting at home in opposition of using huge companies.

The small web is bigger than ever, although the corporate web is even bigger. The pie just got a lot larger. Just as an example: I'm currently researching gravel bikes, because I want to buy one. I encounter:

- Magazines with test reviews

- Blog posts

- Forums sharing experiences

- Bike manufacturers

- Online shops for bikes

- Some review videos

All of them are on https://own.site and not exclusively on big corp websites. The only execption are the videos, which are on YouTube.

Yes, it'd be nice if a restaurant didn't post their menu on Facebook, but in my experience, they are the minority anyways.

I think everyone's own perception and browsing habits play a big role.

I share the same ideals as mentioned in this article, but implementation is what matters. The person who wrote this article references mastodon as an example of the small web, but just looking at mastodon, you can see that is not what happens. Mastodon has a couple of very large hosts with thousands or hundreds of thousands of users, exactly the same as the big web that the author describes. This is because people think "well, why go to the trouble of setting all of this stuff up myself, I will just create an account on one of the existing hosts", and then you just have the big web again.

I think there is a huge difference between deciding to sign up on a huge host vs having to use the big host.

Mastodon maybe isn't the best example of this as IIUC you will get some visibility to other users on your host by default. But for example email you may choose to use GMail or Outlook because it takes no effort, but there is little downside to choosing another host.

On Mastodon you can choose among dozens of servers, you can decide to change server and still be able to use Mastodon. Now compare that with Youtube or Twitter. You can fix some aspects using browser extensions[1] or clients[2] but by and large, if you don't like something about the platform, the only available choice is leaving.

[1] e.g. https://www.undistracted.app/

[2] e.g. https://freetubeapp.io/

I am definitely getting old because such idealism only ticks me off these days.

Make a hardware box that serves as a router, switch AND a home server, sell it at competitive prices, have it preloaded with a hardened Linux containing everything needed (including NAS, VPN, home media organizers and whatnot), make it automatically discover other such nodes (and maybe configure lend-able bandwidth and disk space while you are at it; decentralization!), and then we're talking.

Make it 100% transparent, automatic, fault-proof and as speedy as you can so that the regular Joe and Jane can just install it at home because they heard it's a router and a home server in one and it's costing less than other similar solutions. Tell them it can stream from YouTube and 10 other apps.

Make the regular people tempted to buy it! Only THEN will the "small web" or any such adjacent sentiments take off. Ain't ever happening before that.

Enough with the "raising awareness" stuff, seriously. We on HN / Lobsters and a lot of people on Reddit are quite "aware" already. We get it. But 99% of us have families to feed and seriously can't squeeze the effort unless we're willing to forfeit the precious 5-10% free time a time a day that we get as busy adults.

Make something that will bring the regular people on board. Before that you are just a small fly in an airplane hangar trying to buzz and make a difference.

Ain't happening, dude. Roll up your sleeves and start inventing the future. If you have the time to craft such an article then you likely have the time to start working on the practical aspect as well.

> and then we're talking.

Are we really talking though? I thought the fundamental issue at play is that most people don't care giving up their privacy in exchange for not caring how things work. People aren't going to use the small web because its small, people will use it because its convenient and there is something on it that they want.

i.e. to say just getting the hardware and software right isn't enough, you'll need negative event cycles to shoo people away from the current centralised systems and attractive content being created on your new platform and even then its likely we're "just" building niches. I mean, its a good thing, its just I'm arguing this isn't a "build it and they will come" sorta problem. Its more a "build it, wait twenty years and maybe".

> I thought the fundamental issue at play is that most people don't care giving up their privacy in exchange for not caring how things work.

True, but you can tempt them: "this box can stream from 30 services", "you can download movies from these N pirate websites", "you can block most ads when connecting to this box", "you can attach two hard disks to this box and you'll automatically get storage for downloaded movies and shows" etc.

> People aren't going to use the small web because its small, people will use it because its convenient and there is something on it that they want.

Absolutely. So let's invent something that brings all those conveniences to the table. Ideals don't bring regular people on board, I think we all realize this by now.

> you'll need negative event cycles to shoo people away from the current centralised systems

We already have those. I knew several families happily paying to 3 streaming services even if they weren't high income. Then one evening one of the kids wanted to watch one animated Pixar movie from 10+ years ago. The mom cursed loudly while being unable to find it on all 3 platforms, said "fuck this!" and asked me to teach her how to torrent it. We went to have a dinner in the kitchen and the movie was downloaded when we were back. Two minutes later I downloaded subtitles and off to the races we went. Zero buffering, zero lags, no popups, no ads for other shows. Somebody needs to pee? OK, pause it without looking at anything else but a frozen frame until they are back.

Can you guess what happened next? They educated themselves enough to pirate stuff and and 2 out of those 3 families are with only 1 subscription now. The 3rd is with zero. I didn't preach piracy to them; they already knew about it, they just imagined it was super hard -- which it wasn't. Necessity is the mother of invention, right?

The big players are, ironically, disrupting themselves. They are so worried that somebody else will disrupt them and buying potential competitors left and right... in the end they are the biggest threat to their own business. I revel in the irony.

> this isn't a "build it and they will come" sorta problem. Its more a "build it, wait twenty years and maybe".

Societal changes are glacially slow, sadly, and this very rarely has anything to do with the merits of the old ways or the new ways. The correlation to those is like 10% IMO.

But I'd argue not to look at this through the lens of a future business. Let's look at it as philanthropic endeavour. You likely will make money but no you can't quit your job with that income. It's playing the long game for the good of humanity plus maybe make a few tens of thousand bucks per year in the process.

Nothing starts as a mass adoption product.

Absolutely. I am saying that whoever wants to bring a product to the mainstream must also work super hard to make sure they are solving the right problems for the masses.

And the way to make it a mass product is to make it friendly for the regular users. I feel that a lot of HN-ers get lost in rabbit holes of uber-complex VPN setups or how do you make a Kubernetes clusters of RPi machines, or how do you 3D-print a case for that etc.

Not going to try and dictate what people should work on in their free time, obviously. I am only targeting such preachy articles and organizations. If they have the budget to market some future that they are not inventing yet then maybe they should reallocate some budget to actually inventing it as well.

The thing is, why would I as a consumer buy that? I already have a computer, router, and switch.

True, it's hard to convince them. But at one point they do get sick of their old router and then it's your chance. If you made yourself visible in the meantime you'll eventually win.

But that's not a "hyper-growth" or whatever. That's much more like "be there for a long time, eventually people will find you if you market yourself stably and persistently".

"Big Tech’s tools will never dismantle Big Tech’s house."

This is a JavaScript library that runs sites on a rented server. Might as well be in the cloud.

> 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

This statement makes me not want to read the rest of the article. Pulled out of the air and stated as fact. The term users was around long before big tech.

I am pretty sure that this sentence is an attempt at deadpan humor.

Right, could be

In my opinion "The Small Web" should be "Microsoft Frontpage"ish" paired with one button publishes.

Should give the user the option of hosting it with a wide variety of vendors from shared hosting, something like Netlify, and several like GeoCities. or for advanced users self-publish on a computer they have.

To make it easy for the common person to post what they want on the web.

Involving Javascript, Hugo, an abstraction on Hugo, a database, JavaScript frameworks is just yet another tech stack accessible only to full stack or front-end programmers. (or whoever has the necessary skills.

These people should already have all the information and ability to make their own website and host it wherever they want. They do not require help to solve it.

I would like to see a user-friendly desktop app Like Frontpage was a long time ago. Let people type lika a Wordprocessor, add colors, images, blinking, tables, visitor count, guest books and so on. some other things, press button, its up. Tomorrow write a bit press button, its up.

hey ThinkBeat, sorry to hijack a comment.

You posted a Ask HN: thread [0] Ask HN: Are there any web/text scrapers that work with Facebook Groups?

did u found something working? Or did you drop your search. I am interested in scraping private FB groups

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28095801

Hey,

No, I have not found anything that I would dare to try.

There is a (in my opinion) shady set of "scraper providers" who for some $$$ (how much and by what matrix differs a lot). That claim to do this for you.

Firstly, I dont really trust them to begin with. Second since this a breach of Facebook TOS going with a known provider seems scary and I would prefer to set my own request repeat speed.

More importantly usually their main "top" feature is to scrape out all contact information in a group for "marketing" opportunities.

So I decided against all those.

I am still looking. I have not given up. My need for this is actually increasing.

I tried doing it by hand but I could not stand it.

I have tried some Macro recorders of various types but not found one that really understands what I want to do. The structure of Facebooks pages are (on purpose?) hard to explain to such a tool.

I keep looking around various scraping frameworks for Go, C# and Python. I have not yet been able to create a program / script that is good enough.

It seems so bloody easy when you sit there,with Facebook in a browser you scroll, cut paste, scroll. annoying.

To be clear, I want the content of the post I am an admin for. Other admins and some users are worried that many years worth of great discourse can be lost at a blink of a Facebook eye. So I am trying to find a "backup" solution really.

Small Web: <html>Party like it’s 1999</html>

The author of the article was probably not born then

There is no need to "build the small web". The small web already exists. It's the part of the web that already existed before mega corporations took control.

Interesting to see no one mentioned https://sandstorm.io/ yet, to really get to the small web, we would not only need each user to "serve their own site" but also buy in to self hosting other services, google docs, trello etc

Getting this right at scale is super difficult for many reasons, but the biggest one I can think of is "ease of use" for the general user, and not building things only developers or "tech savvy" users can use.

Great project, glad they kept it online at least, hope someone will move it further on some day.

https://fairapps.net are also hosting an instance, I've used it for HackerCMS scratchpads and stuff, not sure how up to date all the apps are though

The thing about users was cringy, but otherwise I like this. I am not sure where to put it though, should I power up Raspberry Pi for this and let it run all the time or really use my desktop.

Maybe something distributed would be good idea. Then you can use your phone to update it. But then you get into whole crypto thing way too much?

I think this is useful thinking and exploration and if we suspend skepticism, it might be fun. I don't like seeing Twitter and FB and Youtube censoring people (and morons) all the time. I believe in the right of morons to publish stupid things.

I think the ideals are similar to indie web [https://indieweb.org/], so maybe the author may want to join that community. Basically the indie web feels like a mature community-based approach to what the author is describing, minus the javascript library.

My thoughts exactly. The IndieWeb community has been around for some time.

This article has been discussed before, and people familiar with IndieWeb made the same point back then. [0] The author responded [1] but in my opinion it was weak sauce.

Also, IndieWeb is a much better label than small web.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24268472

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269830

While I'm not sure about some of the half-said political attitude in this post, I do strongly believe in what the author is getting at, and am also building a company for "the Small Web". 1

I've been working on an essay for quite awhile now on a similar topic: what does a decentralized web actually look like? If Big Cloud is an empire-sized industry and Blockchain is a wildly re-engineered approach to solving the centralized app problem, then the simple dark-horse is just more folks running server software (at home or just on computers they own). TCP/IP and HTTP as-is decentralize just fine - we have an education and tooling problem, not a technical problem.

> The spiders that sit at its centre waiting to suck you dry are Big Tech people farmers like Facebook, Google

Look, Big Tech doesn't have to be evil for there to be advantages to running your own software. There are _much more immediate_ benefits to every day people, like owning all the rights to all the pictures of their children, seeing fewer ads when consuming media, or having a way to host a website without paying a fortune 10 company a monthly stipend. Melodrama and angry politics aside, we at least agree that it's time to fix the internet :)

1 https://kubesail.com

Yep. I think that kubesail's RPi + tunneling approach is essentially the way forward today. It's what I'm banking on in my projects as well.

The problem with "web2", big tech, call it whatever you like, is not where you host things. Whether you host your own website on your personal desktop or in the cloud, it does nothing to break the power of big tech.

The issue is discoverability. Your content is to be found in Google search, the main social networks and/or app stores. Or you simply do not exist for the world. The gate keepers are there and do not care how you host things.

If we take a very gross average, a typical website may have some 60-70% organic traffic (Google search), 20% from social networks, 5-10% paid traffic depending on your ad budget, and the rest is direct traffic.

So 90-95% of your traffic comes from gate keepers. "Small web" does nothing to change or break this. Who cares where your server is?

Small web equally doesn't mention anything about monetization, the other big issue for publishers.

To sum up, web2 sucks for publishers. You fully rely on gatekeepers for visibility and traffic and it's near impossible to monetize. Mostly because users don't want to pay for anything.

To users, web2 is pretty great. They like having a handful of apps as portals to pretty much everything. They aren't going back to RSS readers or "surf" a thousand individual websites.

> The issue is discoverability

That's only true if you want "big web" vistor stats. You don't need discoverability for a personal website, because the only people that would be interested would be people that know you - and for them, you just email a link.

For this to appeal to an average person I think youd need some $20 device that works out of the box as a server.

Connects to your wifi like your smart tv does, and then does some black magic to get around the NAT issue to register a subdomain that you can use.

The device provides a facebook or twitter like UI to set up your site.

Even then Im not sure how you'll get people off social media onto this as it is still less convenient unfortunately.

It currently costs €69.

https://freedombox.org/buy/

Like many here I want to dig the spirit of this but I am confused about the concrete steps / tools they're describing.

It always seemed to me like ultimately the problem with getting free of the big web would be the physical infrastructure side of the equation.

The modern web does feel controlled by information age rentiers but growing up in the 90s that always felt like an unavoidable given to me.

I was under the impression that the freedom of the web lay in the freedom of information and the subsequent empowerment of individuals to maneuver through and undermine larger systems of power.

What is really not addressed is privacy of content. Regardless of where it’s hosted (AWS v Rpi) the leap from fully-public static site to something you can curate eyeballs on is pretty big. If simple auth (`htpwd`) was more universally supported and easier to use that would be great. But I find myself reaching for a CMS when I don’t want randos looking at my family photos on the open web.

Sooooo..... Web 1.0?

5% of users (People) are creators .. 95% want to mindless scroll Instagram/tiktoc. Not sure why people would want to own their own web (Or understand that they don't own their Instagram) and why that would solve anything.

What would be the small web equivalent of "greenwashing" (when a company talks up how green a product is as a sales pitch)?

It's a bit like rules for being a punk rocker, no?

I vote for "webwashing".

I feel this is basically off-grid living in the cyber space.

while operating the server is the full thing, shared hosting is sensibly doable for most if not all people taking part in the internet.

It's cumbersome application stacks that make hosting a part time job and scare the hell out of laypeople. Disclaimer: I evangelize single-file static monoliths like https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo

It's still big webish in the sense it asssumes most of life is digital.

What if I want no server, and websites I want to read is not about people.

That art style is really getting out of hand- didn't alphabet corporation just come out with campaign using those?

Corporate Memphis? Everyone is at it. Easy to draw I guess and quickly create loads of illustrations.

For small web to exist all fiber ISPs need to provide fixed external IPs and open ports 25, 53 and 80.

Dynamic DNS is a hardcoded rentseeking joke in most routers, they never wanted an open standard for that.

I'm making my own DynDNS but then I now need cloud instances, which is a dependency we should not need.

Act accordingly in your local jurisdiction.

Long term you're probably right, but I think tunneling services[0] like Cloudflare tunnel or my own boringproxy are going to be what we use for the next 10 years or so.

We're going to have to prove that self-hosting is useful before people start demanding ipv6, public static IPs, and decent upload speeds from their ISPs.

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

Tunneling increases latency. Seen that the final medium/media is a 3D action MMO we don't have time for that latency.

I have a little site that I moved behind cloudflare. The dead simple https is nice but I have a page with a gallery of 140 images and it loads so much slower than before the move. Granted I am not paying anything for the service and I don't plan to change it back so this is just an observation.

How much traffic does the gallery get? Unless you have enough people in a given area hitting the site enough for the Cloudflare PoP in that area to have a warm cache, the first request for each image is going to be slower than going directly to the origin server.

It is a site for a game that died ten years ago so it gets more bots than people at this point. Last month my cloudflare email said they saved me 22.7% of 91.69MB.

So you are correct that the cache is never warm.

HTTPS is a waste of electricity.

That's a hot take. Do you never do anything on the web which you don't want your ISP to have full access to?

That said, I agree HTTPS is too complicated to set up, even with ACME/LetsEncrypt. I wish you could just set up your own certificate with the public key in your DNS records. But that requires DNSSEC/DoH or similar.

Most ISPs in Sweden have root certificates.

I use this for security: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289

Trying to avoid MitM attacks from your ISPs is really an exercise i futility, and a really expensive one at that, both energy and timevise.

HTTP, DNS and SMTP are the only protocols you need.

Small web uses small protocols, big web uses big protocols.

For that use case, yep totally agree. But there are a lot of use cases that an extra hop through a proxy that's physically near the origin server still provides very good performance.

if it just were without dependency hell but intended for long-term.

2020

> The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2).

Coincidentally the Who is hiring is front page today. In the comments do a CTRL+F and search for TypeScript and see how many posts are directly correlated with a ginormous framework like React, Angular, or Vue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com