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We need a new (and smaller) web

Note: this article was inspired by:

"Splitting the web", an article by Ploum

The recent group of events surrounding the corporate-driven world wide web is increasing even further the tension from the community, asking for an alternative:

Mainstream social media doing some silly rebranding (Twitter becoming X)
Mainstream social media seeing an opportunity to leech into the fediverse (Threads)
Google pushing DRM to web browsers via their Web Environment Integrity proposal, effectively killing off the possibility for users to build their own version of a web browser, and therefore one of the four essential freedoms required by free software.

It is an accepted fact that we the community have lost the web to billionaries, AI models and surveillance capitalists in general. But it is only lost if we do not change the perspective.

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, once famously said:

Within C++, there is a much smaller and clearer language struggling to get out.

Differences aside, both the web and C++ share a considerable amount of bloat. But, similarly to C++, there is hope for a smaller, sane subset for the web to come out one day. A few months ago, I wrote a quick proposal for such a subset that would allow the community to regain control of the web, by aiming towards a (much) smaller yet stable specification of the modern web:

The Small Web Browser, an inclusive proposal

Surprisingly, this proposal achieved some unexpected popularity when boosted by a well-known Mastodon personality, which can only mean there are many people out there asking for a better web.

Despite the subset, writing a formal specification and building a small web browser are still non-trivial feats. So, please let's unite to claim the web back!

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