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If you haven't heard, a grassroots Internet movement is afoot. It is called "the small Internet". This movement is primarily about recognizing that today most individuals can safeguard their free speech on the Internet by running their own inexpensive, efficient websites. The small Internet movement also acknowledges that web designers should be sensitive to the fact that not all Internet users on the planet have access to the latest computer hardware and software and super-fast broadband Internet connections. The rest of the small Internet movement is about providing pleasant experiences for Internet users by creating many tiny oases in the planet-spanning, Dune-like desert of the commercial Internet.
The small Internet movement is an answer to the question, "Why do we have the Internet?". This question is really a question of values. Why should we have the Internet? What do we value about the Internet? What is worth retaining, and what is not? Those in the small Internet movement believe that free speech, the truth, and knowledge for all enable true freedom and are, therefore, superior to commerce, entertainment, and the ubiquitous spread of government propaganda.
In the early days of the Internet, governments were unaware of their citizens' newly-found freedom via the Internet to shine light on activities that governments would rather remain in darkness. As the years passed and awareness grew, they began to be surprised. Then afraid. In recent years, governments have begun to work tirelessly to put their citizens back into the dark boxes in which they have always kept them. Although many living in the so-called "free world" would agree that free speech is a requirement for sustaining a democracy, most seem to be suffering from the misconception that free speech should be limited only to speech that meets with their personal approval. Due to this lack of understanding, laws and policies are now being put in place in all countries, including the "democracies", to curtail what individuals can say and see on the Internet. Significantly, these policies sometimes do not to apply to politicians. As a result of these laws and policies, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, and may other Internet-based platforms that once allowed individuals to speak their minds no longer do. They have been intimidated. This means that individuals who want to continue to speak their minds on the Internet must either migrate to out-of-the-way platforms that have not yet caught the attention of politicians, or they must create their own platforms.
The small Internet movement believes that perhaps the only intermediate-to-long-term solution to the curtailment of free speech on the Internet is for individuals to create their own websites. The major hurdles to be overcome in order for this to happen have always been that most individuals lack the time and knowledge to run their own websites. Some lack the money to pay for them. Over the last ten-to-fifteen years, software solutions have arrived to lower the knowledge hurdle. However, as many have discovered, most of these solutions increase the costs, both to those who run personal websites, and to those who view them. One reason for the increased cost is that many free software products secretly collect website visitors' data and in so doing, vastly increase the volume of data transmitted across the Internet. This both raises the cost of electricity required to run servers and taxes the bandwidths of Internet users.
To give readers an idea of the large cost differences between typical commercial websites and small-Internet websites, I have created the following table of carbon footprints for a few representative webpages:
Webpage Carbon Footprint (grams of CO2 per page view) Less Carbon than What Percentage of All Webpages?
www.nytimes.com 3.08 14
amazon.com 2.69 16
walmart.com 1.44 44
apple.com 0.69 60
microsoft.com 0.5 70
cheapskatesguide​.org 0.04 95
textnews​.pythonanywhere​.com/english 0.02 97
samsai.eu 0.003 99
jamesg.app 0.002 99
text.npr.org 0.001 99
NOTE: A burning candle produces one gram of CO2 in about 90 seconds.
In response to increased costs, the Internet is buzzing with talk about the concept of "website minimalism". However, with a few notable exceptions in the corporate world, minimalism only seems to have been implemented well on a relatively small number of personal websites. The vast majority of the corporate world seems to either not understand the point of minimalism or not care. Generally, either corporations try to minimize information transmitted to the reader without reducing the data downloaded at all, or they seem to be willing to pay mere lip service to these ideas while being content to go on creating their increasingly bloated Internet. As one writer puts it:
"These comically huge homepages for projects designed to make the web faster are the equivalent of watching a fitness video where the presenter is just standing there, eating pizza and cookies.
The world's greatest tech companies can't even make these tiny text sites, describing their flagship projects to reduce page bloat, lightweight and fast on mobile.
I can't think of a more complete admission of defeat."
Since we often use religious terms to present schools of thought, even those pertaining to the sciences, I will have some fun with this article by using a wealth of religious terminology as I explore this topic. I do not do this to offend the religious or the non-religious. This method of discussing the small Internet also seems especially appropriate, given that much of what I will be talking about will be beliefs, values, ethics, and goals.
Those who believe in the small Internet can be loosely grouped into two camps: the orthodox and the unorthodox. One tenet of orthodox believers appears to be that the small Internet should contain only text, and each webpage should be as small in terms of bytes as it can possibly be. I am bit unclear as to whether all orthodox believers reject small, relevant pictures, but I see that many never include pictures of any kind on their websites. The orthodox also seem to greatly value beautiful webpages. Take this page, for example. It is both beautiful and easy on they eyes. It puts my pink-backgrounded pages to shame. One example of a strictly orthodox believer in the small Internet can be found here (WARNING: Those who are offended by foul language may want to avoid this page).
As with the customarily religious, the small-Internet unorthodox are less "type-A" and more laid-back than the orthodox. Dare I call them pragmatic? The unorthodox are free to enjoy more of life. They believe in reducing burdensome bandwidth requirements for viewing pages on the Internet, just as the orthodox do, but they also believe in having a little fun. Unorthodox believers think the fruits of extra content, as long as webpages remain relatively small, should not be grounds for excommunication from the Church of the Small Internet. As an unorthodox believer in the small Internet myself, I have my own definition of "small". I believe a limit of about 100 KB per webpage should be considered acceptable, certainly not 10 KB or 1 MB. The reason I chose this number has to do with download times. Downloading a webpage containing just a tiny number of bytes will normally take between 0.5 and 2.0 seconds, depending on where the user and server are located relative to each other on the planet. Downloading 100 KB of data on a fairly slow 1 Mb/s connection would take less than another second. That seems reasonable to me.
Just to make myself perfectly clear, I see nothing at all wrong with cool dynamic content, as long as it is run on the server, and does not involve downloading code and running it on the computers of users. What the owner of a website does with his own computing power is up to him. But, beyond sending the text of a webpage to each visitor who requests it, he does not have the right to dictate what visitors to his website do with their computers, even when he is providing free content.
Most believers in the small Internet loosely obey something like the Ten Commandments of HTML, as provided by one of their prophets whose name seems to have been lost by the postdiluvian Internet (postdiluvian = after web browsers were invented). Others, I think, may say that the ten commandments of HTML should be rewritten. For example, here are ten commandments that I would like to see largely obeyed on the small Internet:
Ten Commandments of the Small Internet
• Thou shalt strive to do unto others as thou wouldst have them do unto you.
• Thou shalt strive to minimize thine imposed burden on others' bandwidths as much as possible, within reason.
• Thou shalt strive to make simple, beautiful webpages.
• Thou shalt maximize viewable text per total number of bytes on each webpage.
• Downloading JavaScript to users' computers is of Satan. Thou shalt not do it, ever. Nor shalt thou suffer thy servants in thine house to do it, not thy manservant, neither thy maidservant.
• Thou shalt not use web design software that produces bloated webpages with unreadable HTML code.
• Thou shalt not worship graven large images.
• Thou shalt create webpages that can be viewed with as many Internet browsers as possible, including text-only and very old browsers.
• Thou shalt make navigation easy for others.
• Thou shalt not hide thine old blog posts under a bushel, unless they are no longer relevant.
The first three commandments make clear that the goals of the small Internet should be to provide a pleasant and affordable Internet experience for everyone. Users should be able to quickly find what they are looking for, without having to wait eternities for pages to load or having to click away popups to get to the content they want to see.
I will not even discuss how these goals should apply to commercial websites because as far as the small Internet goes, I think they are lost causes. Corporations are small-Internet Pharisees and Sadducees, and severe violators of commandment number 5. Corporations have in my opinion largely transformed the temple of the Internet into a den of thieves. Many Internet users and website designers probably wish a spot could be reserved in Small Internet Hell for customers and managers who force designers to create massive, user-fury-inducing websites. These people are, in fact, the very reason that the idea of the small Internet is even relevant today. Part of the mindset of small-Internet orthodoxy involves the realization of this fact and a focus on the goal of setting up alternative Internets-within-the-Internet, just as the dark web faithful have done.
The last seven commandments state the means of achieving the goals of the first three. Designers and developers should begin by making smart decisions about the software they use to create their websites. Lately, I have been stumbling across more articles by designers and developers talking about how some design packages create webpages that place heavy yokes on the users of their websites. My personal opinion is that if a developer of a personal website is doing the small Internet right, he should at least be willing to entertain the idea of writing all of his own HTML and other code from scratch. Though I am far from an expert developer, I have so far managed to do this on all of my websites. And, I have to admit that, after an initial learning curve, not only has it not been that hard, but it has been a lot of fun and given me a great sense of accomplishment. The knowledge that nothing on my websites is tracking my readers around the Internet makes me feel really good about my efforts. The very low carbon footprint of my websites is also nice.
The goals of the first three commandments are also achieved by smart website designs that make small-Internet surfing a pleasant experience. By the time a person begins to create his own websites, he should be more than familiar enough with the Internet to know what annoys him. And he should be filled with ideas about how to avoid forcing similar experiences on others. However, he should also make an effort to familiarize himself with the special burdens that the poor, those in lesser-developed countries, and those in many rural areas face when it comes to the Internet. For instance, take a comment made about three months ago by user qwerty456127 in response to a Hacker News post:
"'The small Internet' is a really important thing. Broadband access is not nearly as ubiquitous outside major cities as people believe. People in rural areas may have slow and unreliable (and probably expensive at the same time) connections and retro hardware.
I've read about children climbing up old towers and waiting hours (!) for the school website to load so they can access their homework during the quarantine days. I bet the same information could be delivered in seconds if that was a Gemini or a Gopher page rather than a 'modern' web page bloated with JavaScript frameworks and everything.
I would even suggest discussing an idea of making maintaining a good lo-fi (e.g. Gemini/Gopher or pure HTML) site mandatory for organizations of certain kinds, the same way having wheelchair ramps and proper fire safety equipment is required."
For nearly two decades, I have wondered why the teachers of first through twelfth graders sabotage their students by insisting on putting their lessons mostly in video form. Yes, I said "sabotage". Do they not understand nor care about the burden they are placing on their poorer students by assuming their parents can afford to pay for high-speed broadband Internet connections? Why can't teachers' lessons be in audio format, which is only about one tenth the size of video? Of course, the best format, especially for most older kids, would be text, which is one hundredth the size of video. As a matter of fact, the ideal format would be all three, so that the student can choose the format he prefers and his parents can afford.
Of all people, school administrators who dictate lesson formats and choose software used by teachers to deliver lessons to their students should know better than to make choices that place large burdens on students and parents. Likewise, web designers should know better than to force every reader of a blog article to download megabytes of tracking software disguised as user comment code or webpage heat-mapping software.
School children are not the only ones who can benefit from streamlined websites. Another Hacker News user, wsc981, wrote the following:
"I haven't read the whole article, but I'd like to add that I really love to see more simpler webpages. For many sites (e.g. news), text only would be fine.
In Thailand (where I live) I recently found a super-cheap internet subscription, paying about 1,00 USD (30 THB) per month [0]. Of course, this internet is really slow, not usable for modern sites / web apps like YouTube or Google Maps. But could be very decent if more sites would be trimmed in content to the bare essentials."
I have not discussed the Gopher protocol or the Gemini Project in this article. I have no problem whatsoever with protocols other than HTTP or with decentralized networks that require users to run additional software on their computers, if they choose. However, I think the HTTP protocol used by the regular Internet is perfectly capable of accommodating the small Internet. I do not believe that web designers and developers are incapable of exerting self control in the creation of their websites and, therefore, must be forced into it by some new protocol.
Some small-Internet zealots do not provide links to posts that are more than a couple of weeks old, I assume in order to minimize the data content of the pages that list their posts. While I respect and admire their dedication to their ideals, I think two things about this practice. First, pages on the small Internet should be small in data, not small in number. Second, I think a large body of inaccessible content reduces the enjoyment of readers. Also, it does not make sense. Why would a blogger take the time to write a truly great blog post, only to remove it from his website two or three weeks later? Leave it up, so followers who arrive late to your website can also view it. We have had the New Testament for nearly 2000 years. What would have happened to Christianity if it had been thrown away after three weeks? By removing links to old posts, I fear that zealots may be relegating themselves to the wilderness of the Internet, where like John the Baptist, they will wear hair shirts and eat locusts with their tiny gatherings of followers.
I am sure many would like to see additional commandments added. Some probably wonder why I have not included a privacy commandment or an accessibility commandment. I could also have added a commandment about not using uncommon type fonts that must be downloaded before pages can be viewed. I could have made a larger list, but I believe that after fully comprehending the spirit of the first three commandments, web designers should come up with their own. Theirs should be based on what bothers them, and they should strive not to subject others to it. We should all be creating our own personal commandments for the small Internet. After all, personal commandments are the ones we are most likely to live by.