Re: No Way to Say No - Cameron Rye

📆 2026-09-03 11:03

2 days ago I published the post

When the Small Web Gets an AI Door

and on the same day Cameron Rye replied to the small web community:

No Way to Say No

And, more importantly, he listened

The things people were worried about weren't brushed aside. Per-host rate limiting is now enabled, concurrency is capped and robots.txt is respected. You can explicitly tell gopher-mcp that you don't want it visiting your gemini capsule or gopher hole.

These fixes are NOT the important part. It was acknowledging that the small web isn't just a collection of endpoints waiting to be queried. It's people. It's weird little pages, abandoned projects, personal notes, terrible jokes, and imaginary plants. And maybe the most important part is what the world wide web lost: the wandering.

I really appreciate Cameron taking the criticism and the github issue seriously, admitting where the project got things wrong, and changing it because people from the small web spoke up.

Cameron Rye: thank you for listening and for the coffee. Keep up the great work you do. Your website, blog posts and projects are awesome. I really like the idea of gifting your father a website ... I really think my daughter would be thrilled to get one when she gets older.

P.S. I have a habit of looking at the source of websites I like, because I'm always curious to see how people put them together. So naturally I had a little peek at claytonrye.com and noticed there's some CSS and JavaScript hanging out after the closing </html> tag.

And thank you to everyone who keeps making the small web weird, personal, and human.

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