Small Web

Early web

The early web was diverse, personal and sometimes downright weird. If you wanted a website, you made it, and because of that, it reflected you. Because it wasn't just a couple of clicks, you had to think about it, take some time on it, put some effort in; it wasn't spur of the moment. There were visitor counters, guestbooks and webrings, if you wanted to find a site you were interested in you had to find directories or discover it via other similar websites that linked to it. There was no central index.

Search

As popularity grew, we started getting search engines that crawled all the sites for you and ranked them by popularity based on their own black box ranking systems. This was still a good trade-off, whilst it was still a central system that could be gamed, for the most part what you wanted was easy to find and the centralised index didn't control the content, it just helped it to be found. Obviously, determining which websites were "best" was now a decision being made by a company, and as a company they needed to make money. Even back then this was advertising, but the ads were usually unobtrusive and based on what you searched for and nothing else. The other side effect of this was that sites started being designed around getting to the top result and content wasn't the number one priority any more for a lot of sites.

Blogging

As the internet developed it became more interactive, easier to get content onto. The first stage in this were blogs, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and others. The barrier for having your presence on the internet was lower, it was a lot easier to just throw your thoughts on the internet without too much effort. It was, however, still your space, your words, and (mostly) your rules. Each site had a feeling it belonged to someone, and you could see their personality shining through. It was the start of centralisation; you'd started losing some control over whether your site stayed up or not. There were T&Cs and AUPs you had to agree to for your content and unless you paid, adverts were starting to be shown on your site. Profiles where you shared your interests in a nice easy to collate place, friend lists and subscribers.

Companies started to realise there was a lot of information available, and people were very happy to give more. Once you have more data you can do more with it, and so the platforms started to appear: Facebook, Twitter, and others. These platforms all had nice profiles where you added interests; it was very easy to not only share your thoughts, but also repost others' thoughts, click like, reply. With all the data they had available, recommendations about what you should be viewing became very easy to generate. "For you" sections appeared, powered by algorithms deciding what to show you.

Social Media

Time-based timelines eventually gave way to engagement-based timelines. As this trend continued, everyone you knew was already on one of these platforms, so the barrier for entry got lower and there was an unspoken pressure to join. As the numbers grew, so did their influence - and with that growth came the constant push for quick-win, lowest-common-denominator engagement.

Now the platforms had lots of users, and you were logged in anyway, so why not just use your platform's identity as an identity provider for other sites? It saves remembering another set of account details and reduces the friction. Your identity now wasn't just owned by the platform when you were on their platform, but also when you were on other places too. Everything is being centralised on a few small companies. The majority of a lot of people's interaction with the internet is now done entirely through these few companies. As the internet centralised on these few companies, not only did they try to exert more control over their users, their walled gardens expanded as they bought more and more of the other little companies trying to eke out a living.

Consequences

This centralisation leads to so many downsides for everyday choices and freedoms. With such large amounts of control, they abuse market forces to offer things cheaper than smaller companies, often doing so just long enough to starve the competition before hiking prices. With everything being reliant on a few small companies, resilience goes down.

The consequences of this concentration became starkly visible in 2021, when a faulty configuration change took Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger offline globally for six hours; the outage also prevented anyone using 'Log in with Facebook' from accessing third-party sites. In 2024, a faulty update from security vendor CrowdStrike caused millions of Windows systems to crash, grounding flights at United, Delta and American Airlines, pulling Sky News off-air, and disrupting banks and healthcare providers worldwide. We've seen similar disruptions from AWS, Cloudflare and Google outages. When so few companies underpin so much, a single mistake ripples everywhere.

If you disagree with the masses, or break the "rules", your account is disabled. You no longer have access to everything that you relied on, no emails, no social media, no friends, no history. Usually there is no recourse. Should payment processors be the moral guardians of the world refusing to process payments for industries they disagree with? If a particular service you like isn't getting the right engagement, or isn't profitable enough, it can be cancelled, all your data gone. Censorship is very easy to achieve when everything goes through a few places. Surveillance becomes very easy when everything goes through a few places. A slow siege and slow change, under the guise of being better, new, improved and with all the competition gone, things are shifting to suit the needs of the companies, not the people. Everything is rented, not owned.

Revival

There is, however, a revival of the founding principles of the web. People have started to see the pitfalls of this centralisation and are starting to reject the big platforms, moving back to something more resembling the early web. Call it the small web, the indie movement, the personal web, or whatever you feel suits - the intention is the same: a move back toward something owned and controlled by individuals.

In practice, this means people registering their own domains, setting up blogs, making their own websites. Joining communities of like-minded people, using RSS. The tools to do this have evolved significantly from the early web, static site generators, lightweight hosting, CSS and HTML have also evolved hugely making it much easier for things to look how you want with much less faff.

Motivations for it aren't all the same: longevity, knowing your site can last as long as you want; privacy, knowing your data isn't being harvested, and you're not harvesting that of others. Many are simply exhausted with doom-scrolling endless algorithmically recommended content. The underlying belief behind all of these motivations is approximately the same, the web doesn't have to be what it has become.

Personal sites matter. Basic HTML sites from the early internet still render absolutely fine today. They don't always look as polished as a modern website and their style is questionable, but they still work, easily outliving any of the big platforms. With no algorithm to reward your content, which is often outrage, controversy, relentless positivity or perfection, with no metrics to be aiming at, your content is just what matters, whether that's to thousands, dozens or just yourself. Diversity of form and content, you're no longer restrained to the same layout as every other Twitter user, no longer constrained to the Instagram grid; minimal, maximal, you decide.

The internet is still, at its core, made of links. These links can lead anywhere, including back to a more personal, decentralised web.