What is the Small Web?
ar.al
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:

The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2).

On the Small Web, you (and only you) own and control your own home (or homes).

  • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I looked at the article. Seems like vaporware at the moment.

    The big issue with hosting your own stuff is configuration and security, NAT, sane email handling, bandwidth scaling, domain management, certificates, backup/restore, and issue resolution. Otherwise just build your own box somewhere. One has to make this all easy.

    The other issue is that it is pretty unrealistic to re-write all of this stuff. Much better to pull together the pieces and solve the issues.

    • okawari@kbin.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I only skimmed the video, but kinda paused when they ran a deployment function on a git repository, suggesting they are still just an external hosting provider.

      This struck me as a traditional web host with a built in javascript framework.

        • okawari@kbin.socialEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I think their edge is that they are privacy focused, you can take control of your own data and use non commercial services, like theirs to host your website. Maybe I’m misrepresenting them here, but thats what I got out of it.

          In general, I’m receptive to a new creative space where people can make small fun sites and experiences again like before on the old web. But privacy was not the reason it went out of fashion, so I don’t think their pitch for what is essentially a way to host websites.

          I’m sure it would be possible to self host a kitten site, but unless the code for their infrastructure is open sourced as well as their public tooling then there is both a hosting dependence, and vendor lock in, which is kind of the opposite of freeing your data.

          Hopefully, I’m just misreading the project entirely, I don’t really want to hate on someone’s effort.

          • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            I agree. I am all for people trying other ways. The self hosting of stuff is an unsolved problem. By that I mean self hosting in a simple, cheap, secure way. FOSS makes it all possible but the effort of putting up a VPS is not for the novice and not without a lot of man-hours. One can get something like Synology NAS but that is in no way cheap. Even the VPS approach costs a fair amount once you pay the monthly costs and then pay for domains too, though it is not a lot.

            • okawari@kbin.socialEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Agreed. I found the process of buying a domain and a webhost to be both cheap and quite painless. Once logged in I would even be able to make email addresses and do one click installations of lots of common software such as wordpress.

              I’dd say that if you just want to get your stuff out on the web without being under the umbrella of a larger corporation, the bar is quite low if you know where to look.

              I would much more like to see this bloom into something that mixes with the fediverse. Some kind of easy to use tool that would allow you to create your websites, but also broadcast your changes and your content. Kind of like a webring on steroids

    • readbeanicecream@kbin.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      @furrowsofar User friendliness on the Admin side is definitely barrier. Until tiny box (like apple tv) can be sold with out of the box defaults and an easy to use app for “profile” setup, this may be a pipedream.