The small web

It's still out there. A woman in Maine who's been writing about lichen for twelve years. A retired teacher posting recipes from her grandmother. A teenager keeping a journal under a pseudonym. A developer's notebook with twenty-eight entries about a database he wrote in 2019. They're not on a platform. They have URLs.

This is the small web — the part of the internet that didn't get absorbed.

What it is

The small web is personal sites, run by one person, written for whoever happens to find them. It has no defining technology. No protocol, no logo, no organization. It's a tendency, not a movement: people publishing on their own terms, on their own domains, at their own pace.

A small-web site is usually:

• Written by a person, not a brand
• Hosted on its own domain, or a quiet subdomain
• Updated when the writer has something to say, not on a calendar
• Free of trackers, ads, share buttons, and "subscribe to my newsletter" pop-ups
• Linked to other small-web sites — through blogrolls, webrings, RSS, or just a list of friends

It's slow. It's quiet. It doesn't go viral, and it isn't trying to.

What it isn't

The small web isn't anti-technology. It isn't nostalgia. It isn't Web3, isn't the fediverse, isn't a protest movement.

It's just what's left when you take away the parts of the web that were designed to capture attention — feeds, recommendations, engagement metrics, ad networks, infinite scroll. What remains is people writing things, and other people reading them.

What went wrong

For about a decade, writing online migrated from personal sites to a handful of large platforms. Those platforms made publishing easier, but they also ranked everything by engagement, attached ads to every page, and treated the reader as the product. The work that survived was the work that performed well — which is not the same as the work worth reading.

Personal expression became personal branding. A blog became "content." Writers learned to write for the algorithm before they wrote for the reader.

The small web is what people kept doing anyway.

What it looks like

• A blog where someone writes about woodworking once a month
• A recipe site that's just recipes — no life stories, no pop-ups
• A developer's notebook documenting what they learned this week
• A photo journal with no comments section and no share buttons
• A homepage that hasn't changed its design in three years, and that's fine
• A "now" page describing what someone is working on this season
• A guestbook
• A page of book recommendations, last updated in 2022
• A list of links to other small-web sites the writer likes

None of these are trying to be anything else. That's the point.

Why it matters

Most of what gets written on the internet now is written to be seen. The small web is one of the few places where things still get written to be read.

There's value in that — for the reader, who gets honest, idiosyncratic, sometimes great writing — and for the writer, who gets to think out loud without an audience graph judging every sentence.

It also doesn't go away. A small-web site outlives the trend that birthed it. The platforms come and go; the personal sites are still there.