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Comment by 1317 | Hacker News Reader

looks quite nice, but i always find myself disappointed that all the content on the "small web" is just posting /about/ the small web, rather than doing anything interesting on it

14/30 of the posts on the top page are just about making websites

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I can say from experience that the small web has considerable breadth. I think what you're seeing here is a product of the small, curated list of sites combined with the recency bias of a feed data view.

You'll see similar results from the various indieweb indexes that primarily use the kagi RSS list from github; this list attracts a specific segment of the blogosphere.

thanks for recommending kagi small web, just going through their random posts page i've already seen lots of nice stuff on there

Long ago when we didn’t have Movable Type and every blog was either a work journal on a gopher prefix or a hand-maintained directory of HTML files, this was always the case; a significant fraction, if not an outright majority, of the people willing to try out new styles of interaction are also going to post introspectively about styles of interaction. Developing communities requires discussing developing communities, after all! So it is normal for something that is ‘bubbling’ up from the cauldron of experiments to have a degree of navel-gazing inherent in it — and given how catastrophically blogging went once it lost that aspect, I can accept some amount of ‘seeing how the social structure sausage is made’ if it shifts the overall scales back towards meaningful.

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