The Small Web: A Viewpoint
Date: 2026-04-19
Tags: info smallweb
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Every few months someone writes a piece declaring the personal web dead...the hand-coded homepages, the blogrolls, the webrings, the capsules on Geminispace, the gopher holes that still get a quiet handful of visitors a day. The eulogy is always premature and always misses the point.
The small web was never competing with the large one. That's the confusion. It was never trying to scale. A person who keeps a Gemini capsule and updates it twice a month isn't a failed content creator they're just doing something categorically different. The metric isn't reach. It's something closer to what you feel when you find a note tucked in a used book. Someone was here. They thought about something. They left it for no particular reason.
What made the early web feel alive wasn't abundance, it was legibility of intention. You could tell that a person had made a thing because they wanted it to exist. The under-construction GIFs, the Times New Roman on gray, the guestbooks that three people signed, all of it read as human in a way that even the most beautifully designed content-optimized modern site doesn't. We traded legibility of intention for legibility of content, and I think that was the actual loss.
The small web is still here. It just requires some navigation. You find it through capsules that link to other capsules, through someone mentioning their blog in an IRC channel, through exactly the kind of place this is, a BBS running on a protocol that LinkedIn has never heard of. That's not a bug. Friction used to be what kept the space human. We optimized it away everywhere else.
I'm not making a nostalgia argument. I don't actually want 1997 back. I want the underlying thing that made 1997's online world feel different from what we have now... and I think that thing is still available to anyone willing to run a server, write without analytics, and link to people they actually find interesting.
Questions to ponder...What brought you to the small web? And do you think there's something worth preserving here, or is this just a comfortable backwater for people who liked things better before?
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