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Imagine you arrive at a fine restaurant with a small group of your friends anticipating an excellent meal. Your party is shown to a table overlooking the city skyline. The view is breathtaking. A handsome, neatly-groomed waiter arrives and places before you menus clad in Corinthian-leather covers with embossed gold lettering. He moves on to the next table, leaving you and your friends to open them, marvel at the beautiful calligraphy, and begin to discuss the delicious-looking options. In a few minutes, the waiter returns and asks if you would care to begin with a salad. He pulls a pad of paper from his apron, clicks his ball-point pen and looks around the table expectantly. "Of course," you all say. Each of your friends chooses a salad. The waiter takes down your orders, then heads back to the kitchen. He returns momentarily and carefully places a salad in a shallow white porcelain bowl before each of you. They all look delicious. Then, you look down and notice something. Amid the leafy greens, cherry tomatoes, cheese, and dressing, you are horrified to spot a mouse dropping. You bring this to your friends' attention. They too look down at their plates, and one-by-one each gasps. One of them motions the waiter back to the table. "May we please have salads without mouse droppings?" he asks quietly.
The waiter eyes him--as if dislodging a wad of disgusting, thoroughly-chewed gum from the sole of his shoe--and says in a half whisper, "Sir, our salads do not contain mouse droppings." Your friend holds his salad up to the waiter. The waiter's right eye twitches slightly. He exhales audibly. "My apologies sir. We have had ... an infestation problem. We have tried everything, but nothing has worked, so management has decided just to live with the problem." Your friend explains that salad with mouse droppings is simply unacceptable. "If you prefer," the waiter begins with a tone that sounds memorised, "you may voice your concerns to the chef." Your friend says that is just what he would like to do. The waiter responds, "Very well, sir. Feel free to mail him a letter." Your friend asks why he can't go back to the kitchen or have the chef come to the table. The waiter informs him that the chef is not actually in the building, nor has anyone ever seen him in the building, but he occasionally gives press conferences. After a rather prolonged back and forth between your friend and the waiter, it has become painfully clear that you are not allowed to send the salads back, and complaining will not resolve the problem. Nothing will be done. Your only options appear to be to eat the salad or stand up and walk out.
I can't recall exactly when I first realised that the corporate Internet I had hoped for back in the early 1990's had not exactly materialized. I had assumed that corporations would improve the Internet with much more interesting content. While that has happened, I never anticipated mouse droppings coming along with the corporate salad. If we wish to surf the corporate web or enjoy any of its services today, we must more or less accept what comes with it--blatantly unfair terms-of-service agreements, user tracking, data gathering, and bloated websites with popup advertisements galore. Our data will be sold to anyone with the money to pay, including in all likelihood corrupt governments and their thuggish police agencies. As Molly White put it, "Browsing the web brings with it the ever-present feeling that you're being watched--your activities and preferences and habits all being logged and funneled into a giant vat of horrifying data soup, all just to help more companies serve you more of these intrusive ads that you must endlessly swat away as you try to find whatever it was you were looking for."
Because we have no one to complain to, many of us believe we have only two options, turn off our computers, or eat the corporate salad that has been placed before us. This is exactly what the corporations that control the Web have wanted us to believe and why between the late 1990's and maybe a little more than five years ago corporate websites self-servingly referred to any website other than those hosted by large corporations like themselves as "unsafe", "malware sites", "fishing sites", etc. The truth is that with their malware-infested advertisements, data gathering, frequent data breaches, sale of the data they collect to presumably anyone who will pay for it, the average corporate website is less safe than the average site run by an individual.
Fortunately, many individuals have now realised that in addition to eating the corporate salad or simply walking away from the Internet entirely, a third option exists. That third option is known by various names--the small Internet, the small web or smol web, the old Internet, the personal web, the wild web, etc. In this article, I will refer to all of these collectively as "the small Internet" and leave the reader to delve further into the differences in their exact meanings.
Unlike the corporate Web, "the small Internet" is a term that is not clearly bounded, nor is everyone in agreement on its exact definition. Some believe the term should be applied only to sites that are hosted using communications protocols other than HTTP. In contrast, one blogger named Felix defined "the small Web" as, "all the things people are doing to claw back the 'net from corporations". I think of the phrase "the small Internet" as applying to everything that is noncommercial and created and hosted by individuals for individuals, including content found on the Web. An anonymous blogger put it this way, "before there was social media, people staked out their own spaces online and connected with other people who were also staking out their own spaces. personal web sites, blogs, IRC, bulletin board systems, mailing lists: these were all ways of connecting with each other in ways that meant real people could talk to real people as real people, not as a demographic for advertising." That is very close to my definition of the small Internet, and by that definition, parts of the small Internet have existed for more than three decades, despite the corporate Internet's nearly complete refusal to acknowledge its very existence via its search engines or links from corporate websites. In fact, the small Internet existed before the corporate Internet.
The small Internet can be distinguished from the corporate Internet in a number of ways. It is not designed to make money, but when necessary, its site owners may ask for help in the form of small donations to help pay for hosting costs. It does not contain pop-up advertisements or intentionally gather visitors' data for sale to who-knows-what shady organizations. The small Internet has a different set of values, which include creativity, fun, community, mutual support, and the free exchange of ideas and information. By this definition, the small Internet is spread across many networks. Gemini and Gopher have already been mentioned. In my view, the small Internet also includes well-known networks like the Tor network and the Fediverse, and it extends to more obscure networks like Secure Scuttlebutt, I2P, IPFS, ZeroNet, Aether, Nomadnet, Nostr, and Freenet (now known as Hyphanet). It is composed mostly of blogs on the Web and their equivalents on other networks, but it also includes many, many small social networks run by individuals. The small Internet is filled with articles and conversations about things that are important to individuals--hobbies, books, movies, music, work experiences, interpersonal relationships, politics, sports, computers, software, consumer issues, news, religion, history. On these blogs and social media sites, visitors can see what people really think, because no one is filtering out everything but the corporate line--in other words, anything that doesn't sell a product. The small Internet also contains services, but they are necessarily on a much smaller scale than the corporate-controlled Internet services. The small Internet has small search engines, small web hosting services, file-sharing services, and even a few small email servers. The small Internet is also filled with something for which the corporate Internet has never been known, blog rolls, thousands and thousands of them, "large" and small. These are mostly how content is discovered on the small Internet.
Although the majority of individuals now host their small Internet sites via commercial hosting companies, which has unfortunately become the modern trend for everyone, some also run their own private services and websites on servers in their physical possession. The more technically sophisticated among them host from their "home labs", often consisting of old commercial rack-mounted servers. Those with less technical expertise or those who would rather not be bothered with the process of setting up multiple types of servers connect old laptop or desktop computers to the Internet and run software like Yunohost and Freedombox that provide an array of services. Some like me host their websites on inexpensive and power-efficient Raspberry Pi computers.
For years, many of us have eagerly anticipated a future in which the small Internet would no longer be small. More precisely, I should say we have been dreaming of a future when the small Internet would retain its makeup of small websites run by individuals, but they would multiply to become millions of such sites. We have hoped for so many sites that we would never have to worry about running out of fun and interesting blogs to read and interesting conversations to join. At some point, I made a more intentional effort to venture back onto the small Internet or personal web, and I began actively looking for and reading its blogs again. I loved them, but I wanted both more articles and a wider variety of them. And, I wanted more blogs run by individuals who continue to produce new content for decades, not just for months or a couple of years at most. Now that I am running my own blog, I understand just how difficult producing new content year after year can be.
Today, the number of all types of websites run by individuals and groups of individuals has increased to the point where I could never hope to read more than a tiny fraction of all of the interesting content they produce. While I can't always find the exact article I want, I often can't do that on the corporate-controlled Web either. What I am trying to say is that the small Internet is better than it has ever been, and I should know. I have been surfing the Internet since the beginning, since before it was even called "the Internet".
I think the small Internet has come a long way over the past five to ten years as the corporate web has done little but churn and generally decline in quality. Cory Doctorow even coined the term "enshittification" to help draw attention to how this occurs on corporate-controlled social media sites as they age and inevitably die. An article by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon describes the problem, "Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They're plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within." The reason the small Internet has grown and prospered is of course because the only alternatives are the corporate web or leaving the Internet entirely, and as the corporate web has slowly declined in value to each of us who use it, more of us have looked for something that better meets our needs in many important areas of our lives. We have found the small Internet, realised its value, and wanted to support it in the best way it can be supported, with our individually-written content and small services. My own contributions include the Cheapskate's Guide and Blue Dwarf.
A recent Blue Dwarf post includes a statement by--of all people--a blogger who does not believe we are making a difference on the Internet. His argument seems to be that not only is starting a website hard, but almost no one will see the content you put on it anyway. This is a common point of view, and I agree with part of it. Convincing a significant number of people to begin reading your new blog does take years. That has been the case since at least 2010 and probably before. It requires a HUGE amount of work. This should be a well-known fact by now. But, while I share his view that attracting visitors to a new blog is difficult, I think his perspective still needs to change to reflect the true situation in which we find ourselves.
We--you and I as individuals and as collections of individuals--have already changed the Internet, and we are continuing to do so. We simply must recognize three things. First, if we do not continue to work to change the Internet, we really will have only two choices: the corporate salad or nothing. Second, the control of the Internet is ultimately in our hands, because despite corporations' vigorous efforts to keep us on their sites, they do not have the power to lock down the Internet to prevent us from going wherever we like, unless we believe their lie that our only two options are to eat their salad or leave. Many of us have already realised we have other options, and that has given us the power to change the Internet. Third, each of us must banish the idea from his mind that he has failed if he creates a website and millions of people don't flock to it. That is corporate thinking, and it has no place on the small web.
We should be creating websites because we have something to share that has value to us that we think others may also benefit from. Ideally, a personal website should be thought of as a gift to all Internet users and as a way for each of us to express the issues, thoughts, and viewpoints that are important to us, unfiltered through a giant corporation's algorithm. Some of us like Winnie Lim write for ourselves as well as for others, "Writing is my primary mode of communication. It is the only way I can attempt to understand myself, much less trying to make others understand me. The words which flow out of my hands and onto the screen, make some sense of the abstract chaos in my mind. They circumvent the disconnect I seem to have between my brain and my vocal cords." Creating personal websites should have nothing to do with money or popularity. With that view foremost in our minds, the small Internet cannot fail to thrive, especially in countries where free speech is not actively blocked by governments.
"Zebrat" pointed out in the same Blue Dwarf post that I mentioned above, "There may be a small number of people who think the internet can be turned completely away from corporate interests, but I don't think this is possible or even desirable, and most people would probably agree." Exactly right. We do at times want to buy things online, but that is not the sole reason for the Internet's existence. Corporations have been so fixated on selling us things that they have tried and almost succeeded in hiding everything else on the Internet. I believe the Internet has a much greater purpose, and I am certain many millions of Internet users agree. The small Internet is playing its part in serving our other interests. Both the small Internet and the corporate Internet have value, and neither should be allowed to push the other out of our field of view. This is not about "winning" or "losing". This is about having access to the content we want to see. And guess what? It is there. The Internet contains not just thousands of individually-run blogs. It contains millions. Blogs are not only not dying; they are thriving. Last year, the estimated number of blogs was over 600 million with about 7 million new blog articles published each day. Nearly 33 million bloggers lived in the United States alone. In other words, nearly all of those blogs were owned and run by individuals! If one insists on making this about winning, that is what winning looks like. No wonder commercial search engines send so little traffic to personal websites. If they weighted all Internet content equally, users would have trouble finding the corporate Internet!
At this point, some readers may be thinking, if so many personal blogs exist on the Internet, why am I not seeing more of them? As Kelsey McKinney lamented, "I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it." I have news for you. The Internet is still that way, but that is not what you see if you rely on the big search engines to show it to you. Corporate search engines will almost never take you to a personal website unless you are either very lucky or you already know it exists. If you already know a website exists, you don't need a search engine to find it. This means only those who are motivated and know how to look will find what they are looking for on the small Internet. Fortunately, discovering personal websites has been made easier over the last five years or so. We now have a number of small search engines and even more blog rolls that can help. Here are a few of the best for locating content on the small Internet:
Small Internet Search Engines:
(roughly in order of the ratio of small Internet content to corporate Internet content)
-- focuses on the "indieweb" or "small web" or "digital gardens"
-- one of the first tiny alternative search engines
Marginalia -- an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content
-- "for those who value privacy and are trying to escape big tech"