Disclaimer - This entry is written from a place of sadness, not anger. It's deeply biased and subjective and leaking non-general experiences from every pore.
When I was barely a preteen, I was a frequent user of music-themed forums. They were not small by any means: they were full of regulars that you'd run into in most threads, and as IM services like MSN gained traction, one could even dare extend a friend request so that you could talk in real time on the weekends when school and work were out of the picture.
MSN less so, but these forums are what I dream of when I think about what the utopia of a small web means to me. Granted, they were built upon a restrictive infrastructure that was bleeding edge at the time, and I'm not a fan of nostalgia as the driving factor for making the active choice to build communities based on degrowth and sustainability. But I miss being able to build relationships through asyncronous communication that were easily accessible to users who were not very tech-savvy. Financially supporting very lightweight infrastructure because you knew and loved the community that inhabited the space, instead of saving up for potential upcoming growth.
I'm frustrated that such sentimentality is driving me and obscuring the very real downsides of forum culture, and in some ways also preventing me from enjoying the things that the small web provides. But I am acknowledging it because I want to be aware of that bias as I try to figure out why the small web we're building feels off to me.
The reason the small web is called that and not just "the web" is because it's a deliberate opposition to scalability in most tech infrastructure, a firm belief in the inherent goodness of "less":
I think these things are desirable, which is why I've been curious about the different projects that pop up and have tried my hand at engaging with them even when I have no tech background and no attention span that can get me through technical documentations.
However, the pleasure I feel by creating and sharing with the communities that inhabit these corners of the internet is offset greatly by the sheer loneliness that rejection of the corporate, centralized web entails.
Perhaps it's the feeling that the effort that I require to set up a hub on self-hosted, lighted infrastructures simply does not pay off - But does it not pay off because I'm used to the immediate feedback and sporadic engagement coming from strangers in the big web? Or is it really this lonely for everyone?
I find the technical process of setting up a capsule, an IndieWeb site, a fediverse instance... quite fun, until I start using the thing that I dedicated so much time to and find myself devoid of human contact.
Granted, there's tools to aid communication between a new node in these networks and the existing network at large:
With the exception of relays, which suck because their ties with the desire to grow connections non-organically lead them to become unmoderated cesspits, these are all pretty solid tools! They let strangers stumble upon your little sites and give them a way to engage in conversation, usually through e-mail or backlinking.
But people very rarely take the time to shoot you an e-mail to talk about what you wrote. And, in my experience, explaining how to engage in small web discoverability practices like feeds, backlinks and crawlers is a miserable process for both the explainer and the poor sod that is on the other end of a very overwhelming, very technical explanation.
Having typed all this out, I think it's not the technical discoverability features that are off, or even the deliberately curated connection infrastructure... It's hard to get used to the level of effort that the small web requires for it to operate in a more socially, communally relevant way.
Would documentation oriented towards people who agree with the values of the small web, but does not have the technical knowledge to fully engage with it make the isolation of newer nodes less poignant? Would people take the time to reply to others, when there's something to say?
I don't have definite answers. But it makes me want to try and make the small web a more accessible place. Shoutout to those of you already working on that!