#small internet

[lamuta]

i miss the days when the web was actually wide

[fennysstuff]

WAAAAAIT WAIT WAIT *YOU* ARE FUNGE G ON YOUTUBE AREN’T YOU. I’VE LOVED YOUR STUFF FOREVER

YEAH I AM!! HOLY CARP THAT'S CRAZY

[trannus-aran]

semi-unpopular niche places online are the best parts of the internet

[vvatchword]

My latest obsession has been Small Internet. The idea is to return technology to a more user-centric experience.

The problem, as Small Internet users seem to see it, is that the World Wide Web has been hijacked by corporations for whom users are products, with manipulative design, invasive ads, and abysmal privacy. Moreover, as the Internet has evolved, it has grown to require more and more skill to create a functional website, until the best and most responsive websites require skilled experts. On the user side of things, design is less tailored for a user’s comfort or use, and the users tend to have less control over how they present themselves to the world. Users with disabilities, such as the blind, are also often sidelined.

The result: a less human place that revolves around money, shine, flash, clout, speed, cults of personality, intense emotional response, and base manipulation.

How do you solve this?

By being useless, of course! Make a system difficult to be abused by a titan. Fracture it. Remove options. Become purposely obtuse. Become simple to use to an almost sinful degree. Get ugly. Do more with less. Hell, one bunch has challenged themselves to design the cleanest website with the smallest bandwidth.

Popping back and forth between the Small and modern Internets has been an enormous eye opener. For example, when you hit a website on Neocities, you can’t help but see the person behind it—it reflects their tastes, desires, hobbies, personality, and so on. Every single website is as unique as the person behind it; every design choice a delightful surprise.

But go to their Twitter page, and the standardization reduces their humanity. All you can see of them is an icon, a header, and the text they have produced; and because the design has pinched them into a tiny part of the website, they have been overshadowed. They have become part of the machine. This is about TWITTER, not about THEM. I feel like I could write a thesis about how this standardization might even impact groupthink, thus adding fire to Twitter’s performative morality and mob justice.

Small Internet’s other extreme is to remove almost EVERYTHING from a site—I’m using “site” here as a catchall, as depending on where you are, it’s not technically correct to call it this—and basically go early Telnet. You’re a text file on the Internet. ASCII art might be the only art. No styles, and even “hyperlinks” (possibly not a correct term in this case) can seem alien.

You might (correctly) note that this removes all personality completely; how is the standardization of a text file different from Twitter? And I say it’s because it has no brand: it’s a tool. It is not in service of any philosophy or human being. It sells nothing. It stands alone. It can’t show you ads, it can’t track you, it can’t earn anyone a dime, and it’s ugly as sin. Also notable: once you jump the learning curve, anyone can do it. It is completely utilitarian. There are few ways to dress it up or down—and some of the ways to dress it up are completely dependent on you as the viewer (a novel experience!). It becomes all about WHAT is said, not HOW it is displayed.

Icing on the cake: Small Internet tends to be kind to people with disabilities. If it’s just text, their screen readers won’t go to hell trying to communicate with them.

Small Internet is also a philosophy. For example, using antiquated styles and code. Purposely creating websites that are designed to earn low rankings from search engines, thereby almost guaranteeing their complete anonymity. Of course, you don’t have to go this far; you might reduce how much you profit monster companies by downloading ad blockers or using nonprofit, privacy-oriented browsers like Firefox. (I’d also say two accidental holdouts of Small Internet philosophy are Reddit and Tumblr.)

If you’d like to explore the Small Internet for yourself, I have some wonderful options you can look into. If you want to leave the WWW entirely, you can jump onto Gopher, an ancient form of Internet that’s still alive and well. You could use Mastodon.social, a decentralized social media network. You could create a website at Neocities.org, where websites are often purposely archaic or odd. You could use the search engine Marginalia (search.marginalia.nu), which purposely seeks noncommercial websites, and favors clunky ones over their smooth and modern counterparts.

My next pursuit is going to be retrocomputing. I’d also like to see how much I can scrub myself from the Internet in general. The way the Internet spiders through everyday life, this is practically impossible—and, socially speaking, undesirable—but maybe I can cause a little trouble on the way.

[deduslinks]

marginalia search - another small internet search engine - for when you need to look up stuff without 10 pages of bot generated blogspam

[thenumberniine]

Grandpa: *to me, while I was browsing stuff on my phone* Why are you so silent?

Grandma: *pointing to my phone* She has small internet there

[seren-in-charge]

Working on my own small internet project!

Which is a collection of sites I frequent alot, blogs, documentation, personal sites, archived sites ... etc, some of these sites are mirrored, and some are ZIM files, which includes the offline Wikipedia and others.

I also serve other media like PDF books, TV shows, Anime, movies, comics and music locally using jellyfin, link:

Unlike Jeff I only have an old Dell laptop and a hard drive but its alright.

My small internet supports offline viewing, but only as a fallback for personal websites and blogs to support the creators with ads and traffic.

Im having fun with it so far, I aim to turn it into my primary internet experience and extend it with a fancy welcome page instead of the default browser one.