What The Small Web Is Missing
The small web, the indie web, the old web, whatever you call it, has become a meme. There is a growing momentum behind it, maybe even a movement. We have hosters, social networks, publishing software, web servers, authoring tools, client software, and custom protocols for the small web now.
None of that is directly accomplishing anything, only indirectly. The small web needs users, content, and discoverability.
Getting users is the toughest sell, because right now, they are on social media, and there isn’t really any way to tell them to browse the small web other than linking from social media. Discoverability will only be a problem once we have more content and users. We should start with content.
Content is King
Right now, you can just get started making content for the small web. you can write content for your web site - I assume you have web space somewhere, otherwise I recommend neocities - in a text editor. I doesn’t have to be a fancy responsive site, that’s why I think writing HTML in a text editor is fine, really. If you just want to get your text to the end user, simpler HTML is better. As long as the content (not the fancy web design) is readable (not pixel-perfect) and does not crash anything in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Android Browser, Dillo, Midori, Opera Mini, Amaya, W3M, Internet Explorer 8, and Lynx, you can even use some html5 features.
This post right here could be a simple HTML file. It doesn’t need JavaScript or CSS. It only needs a title, paragraphs, headlines, italics, and maybe a hyperlink, but there haven’t been any up to there. There is no reason it shouldn’t be readable in Dillo or on the Opera browser on my old Nokia feature phone.
A much bigger challenge is the kind of content the small web needs. Social media is full of memes, jokes, reactions, comments, current events, politics, gossip, personal stuff, and TV episode recaps.
The old web had a much longer memory. Old content wasn’t pushed off the first page of the time line by new content. Although home pages and web sites were living documents, there was less risk of the content of a web site going stale over time. Current events and half-baked ideas were discussed on mailing lists and in newsgroups, but web sites were collections of documents that were self-contained and finished to some degree. You don’t find this kind of content on twitter.
What the small web needs is self-contained, low-context, evergreen content.
Self-contained means pages you can read from start to finish without having to follow link after link to the beginning of the story. So much online content today is told in incremental update after update, without ever coming to an end. It doesn’t necessarily all have to be individual pages disconnected from other content on your site all focusing on different topics. You can have content that can be consumed in one sitting and without following any links, or a collection of pages on your site all organised around a handful of topics linking each other within your site/domain, or a wiki/dictionary
Low-context means your content should be accessible to strangers who don’t know you, your social circle, or your memes. If you want your content to be accessible to outsiders, you need to at least include keywords, but preferably hyperlinks, or even better explain the context somewhere on your site. If you have a site called “Richard’s Organic Chemistry Emporium of Jokes“, then you don’t need to link to the Wikipedia page for organic chemistry, as long as it’s clear to readers what your credentials and goals are - they can always decide to look for a more reputable source on chemistry, or to search the web for information about the topic of chemistry if they don’t get the punch lines. If you write about “The last episode of GBBO”, it will be hard to understand a year later. If you reference a meme or in-joke, it will be hard to understand without context. Web content is for people who surf the web, so context should be accessible through following links or looking up the words in the document - but not dependent on the document you came from, or things that were published at the time but not linked.
Evergreen content has some overlap with low-context, but it doesn’t just cover understanding, but also relevance. A lot of gossip, TV episode recapping, frontend web development tutorials, or political hot takes on social media are not relevant two years later, even if you meticulously document which political gaffe you are referring to instead of just tweeting “ROFL” without context. Social media is a constant content treadmill where old stuff is getting less and less relevant. In the old days, even places for ephemeral content such as newsgroups and mailing lists had FAQs to collect timeless information. These FAQs are absent from twitter hashtags. Your small web site should have content people will want to link to from other small web sites, not just tweet out and forget about, and you want them to bookmark it and share it three years later when a friend asks for a resource.
Beyond that, making content that lasts is a good way to avoid burn-out, and it supports other people’s small web sites by preventing link rot. Fungible content like hot takes, listicles (a word which my Firefox does not know and helpfully tried to correct into “testicles”), and pornography exists under constant pressure to churn out new content, and no particular obligation to preserve old content. There is a network effect at work with long-lasting content. People will bookmark and link to your content, and link to it from other sites, both ephemeral and long-term, so in the end, you aggregate more Google juice by surviving longer.
On a site with long-lasting content, it can make sense to edit an old page and add a quick note or revision history, instead of posting a new version of an old idea with a new URL.
The type of content that warrants this kind of care is very different from the type of content you would post on social media. It doesn’t make sense to have a permanent page with pictures of your food, but it makes sense to have a page with recipes. It doesn’t make sense to have a permanent page on which you riff on current events and dunk on public figures, but it makes sense to have a page where you collect jokes.
The Hyperlink
They used to say that the hyperlink is the currency of the web. Today it’s liking, or perhaps following. We have gone from a web of mostly-static content and links to a web of brands, influencers, personalised ads, search engines, and recommendation systems. Making small web content will make the hyperlink relevant again.
Hyperlinks became less relevant long before the start of the current age of social media in the 2010s. During the 2000s, slowly at first, hyperlinks were made less relevant by search engines, tagging, and Wikipedia. People were getting more and more used to googling words instead of following links, and more and more often, Google replied with Wikipedia as the first result. Paradoxically, this trend ran counter to the original design of Google search, which reified the currency of the hyperlink by basing search rankings on the structure of the network of links between web sites. People were linking less because search and tagging were so good.
If we produce content that’s worth linking to, at cool URLs that don’t change, maybe we can restore the hyperlink back to its rightful position. Or maybe we will just produce some good good content for a change, instead of ghost town online communities.
