Invasive tracking and pay-for-play search engines has broken the internet. It’s time to reclaim our independence with the Small Web.
I've said for years. We need web1.5.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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At least we have the tildeverse
I'm embarrassed how I forgot about the famous ~
Link us your website then.
Webrings ftw!!!
Who is "we"?
Technoactivists can't even get people to use free software when it works and there's like five of us over here in AP land.
Who is out there willing to create a movement to go back to navigating an page index or a webring? In what universe? Multiple governments freaked out about TikTok because the data was going to the bad spies they didn't like and they STILL couldn't get people off TikTok and into anywhere else.
I mean, if you have a time machine I'd happily blow up Skynet and tell 90s communication scholars that they were right about every single thing they were saying about search engines and algorithmic content, but that genie got out of the bottle, regained his freedom from the kindly street rat-turned-prince with his third wish and is halfway through Disney World by now.
For a lot of people it's not even "going back". They are either to young to have experienced the old web or did but bounced of it. There is a sizeable group of people out there, who went online for the first time not despite facebooks privacy invasive profile building but because of it.
Lemmys default web UI doesn't have a endlessly loading newsfeed. That's a intentional design decision to help users spend less time on the platform. Because spending to much time on social media is bad for your mental health. So having friction points is a good thing.
Except the competition doesn't do that. So what is your average social media addict to do when they hit a friction point? They won't close the browser. Instead they will go back to the commercial platforms.
Some people like junk food. But creating addictive social media yourself isn't a good option either
You're not wrong.
The biggest caveat I'd have is that social media with a friction point is still bad. The negative effects of the whole thing are fundamental to the types of interactions it fosters. Even purely direct messaging applications can and will generate a lot of the same results.
And I would even argue there was no Web 1.0. Back in the webring days I was already in IRC and Usenet was a thing. The only reason it seems healthier from a distance is that fewer people were doing it. Get back to that tech with the same user counts we have now and you have the exact same thing. Just with more ASCII art and fewer AI filters, I guess.
Hey I'd love to read sone of those 90s scholars you're talking about. Any suggestions?
Sherry Turkle’s book “Life on the Screen” was an amazing read back in 1997
The blurb:
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity—as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people’s experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.
A good look at the sociology and psychology of the early internet and how it has potential to impact in both positive and negative ways.
Oh, man it's been ages. I'm talking being in high school and having teachers talk to me about this. And then being in uni and having it be a thing people argued about.
I do not have any of the papers on hand or even remember the authors or names. The idea that algorithmic searches would create a bubble of self-selected media and erode a sense of shared reality isn't new, though. We're talking mid-90s here. People were arguing this about Altavista.
I wasn't around back then, but people like Oscar Gandy and Dan Schiller were open critics of personal data and centralization. Maybe that gives you a good lead.
I've recently found the indieweb, from their website:
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.
We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
Check out personalsit.es too - a wonderful collection of small, independent websites curated under the banner of personal websites. A lot of tech people there, but some other little nuggets too.
There’s also the indieweb webring which is a great old-school way to discover more sites on the indie web.
Those are great links. Thanks for posting them! Gonna give them a look.
Thanks, those are awesome! I'll be adding my own site to both
y'all know that web 2.0 includes things like lemmy, right?
Yeah, from what I remember of what Web 2.0 was, it was services that could be interactive in the browser window, without loading a whole new page each time the user submitted information through HTTP POST. "Ajax" was a hot buzzword among web/tech companies.
Flickr was mind blowing in that you could edit photo captions and titles without navigating away from the page. Gmail could refresh the inbox without reloading the sidebar. Google maps was impressive in that you could drag the map around and zoom within the window, while it fetched the graphical elements necessary on demand.
Or maybe web 2.0 included the ability to implement states in the stateless HTTP protocol. You could log into a page and it would only show you the new/unread items for you personally, rather than showing literally every visitor the exact same thing for the exact same URL.
Social networking became possible with Web 2.0 technologies, but I wouldn't define Web 2.0 as inherently social. User interactions with a service was the core, and whether the service connected user to user through that service's design was kinda beside the point.
It's not the technology at fault, but the advertising industry
But JavaScript was a mistake. I've made my point. I'll hear no counter arguments.
As great as it would've been to have Python on the Web instead of JS I don't think that would've gone well when the Python foundation decided to make Python 3 incompatible with Python 2. That change already broke a lot of shit (Kodi addons never quite recovered from that) and I remember many people excusing it, but if websites ran on it, that wouldn't have been inconvenient, it would've been far more devastating.
Oh,,,
It's not just advertising (and its commensurate tracking paradigm)...
Data mining for profit, SEO for profit, and pervasive Counterfeit Cognizance are all playing their part in ruining the Internet experience.
Perhaps all the above could be summed up by "Capitalist Greed"...??? 🤡 🖕
Perhaps all the above could be summed up by “Capitalist Greed”…??? 🤡 🖕
No. It's can't. And you're actively hurting your efforts by attaching high school edgelord bullshit to it.
Corruption has been a seriously problem everywhere, forever, and does not care one bit what words the ruling party uses to express themselves. None of what is happening right now is restricted to nations which call themselves capitalist.
high school edgelord bullshit to it.
😂 🤣 Bye.
You dont have to call yourself capitalist to be capitalist. The main difference between modern western capitalism and classic monarchy is the collective perception of divine right. Now that perception is completely personal.
But is it? Because the amount of websites that aren't search engines but have insane levels of tracking and data collection are very high. Not all of it is for search ranking, IMO.
Still not the technology at fault. Webapps for example are a good innovation. But it's used for evil as well.
I mean, yes and no.
You know how when you look up at a nights sky, and the whole sky is covered in a series of rotating popup ads, with the stars as their backdrop?
What do you mean NO??? When you use your telescope to try to look at space, and all you see is a facebook ad, a mcdonalds ad, a starbucks ad, an ad for a local lawyer, you know.....space ads. We've all seen them. Just ads floating in space, illuminating the night sky.
Oh, my mistake. This is 2025. That's commonplace in 2125. See, the technology to impose global space ads isn't a thing yet.
The thing about technology is, there's always somebody looking to profit off of every new technology. The technology behind space ads is actually used to show important global events, like what the global dictator does everyday. Oh, right. In 2125 there's a global dictator who rules the entire planet through oppression and slavery. So, not much different than 2025, besides even the illusion of freedom is gone.
The point is, you don't have the technology to put ads in the sky, and therefore the advertising industry can't yet be blamed. But once it exists, they will.
It really is a chicken or the egg situation.
Sky ad technology can be developed out of the good of someone's heart. Maybe to show emergency alerts quickly. Disaster warnings. But then, it gets in the wrong hands.
We could say similar stuff about the internet. I don't think Tim Berner's Lee had bad intentions when founding the World Wide Web. It's a double edged sword. Same has happened with a lot. I even believe that God's sacrifice on the cross- an act of perfect love for all humanity- has been misused to control, manipulate and abuse. The guy who created dynamite wanted it to be used for safer mining practices, not a weapon. Many things we make as humans seems to be invented for good, but used for evil
Internet advertising wasn't initially that bad either. People would pay to have a button for their site to appear on another page. Or a video to play on a streaming site. Then someone thinks "let's actually make more relevant ads appear. This video is about videogames, let's show a videogame ad." Then: "We can see what videos this user likes, so we can get an idea that they like videogames, so let's show them videogame ads, even on other videos". And it eventually morphed into "We can see this user visited this videogame shop 1 month ago thanks to our other maps service. Let's show them adverts for that shop's sale". It's just crazy.
I certainly hope you're oversimplifying for the sake of expressing a core concept. Because the amount of tracking, and profile building goes far FAR beyond what you've just said.
It's like 1984 (the book) is tame by comparison.
I am
I'm not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He's like "2.0?!? Where have you been? It's all about web3 and blockchains." Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?
When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.
Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!
But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.
Was just talking with a coworker about how with the rise of server-side rendering we’re finally technologically back to Web 1.0
Lol we talked about that back when Google implemented dynamic rendering
Yeah that stuff bugs the shit out of me. It’s like people just discovered they can send HTML to a browser.
Skipping that whole loop would be far more efficient but it’s not cool to do that any more.
Right??? Like it's 1995 all over again.
Well, we're totally doing this and it's working quite alright if you ask me.
"We" have been battling giants and absolute war machines for decades and...we're still here, right? Open source software is running 90% of servers, and driving the innovation faster than ever. It's supporting their shitty techbros empires and letting them live their wicked dreams just because the anarco-communist principles put freedom as the centermost value of all of this. Isn't it?
All the while, aren't we totally enjoying our small web world already? As many of us have pointed in the comments? We won't cure tiktok adrelin addicted kids by inviting them into a webring. And I don't think I even want them in before they're cured anyway. Prohibiting greedy capitalist from poisoning our children isn't our technological endeavour. We fight back, protect ourselves, and prepare the world after. But it's a bigger problem than the fediverse, isn't it?
Anyway, I propose we selfhost a lot of good stuff and get kids addicted to robbing giants, waddaya think? Yar
Honestly the hardest part of doing this seems to be settling on what we're going to call it. Ironically, it is difficult to search for and discover sites following this philosophy precisely because they are so decentralized and independent and nobody's even using any common terminology for it. I've heard variations of this called Web 1.0, Small Web, Indie Web, Nostalgia Web, Old Web, Retro Web, Analog Web, Free Web, Libre Web, and dozens more terms even more vague and difficult to remember off the top of my head. "Small Web" seems to have the most traction from what I can tell but discovery remains such a hard problem to solve, especially without falling into the same traps that led us here.
To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren't focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.
Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can't produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can't bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won't have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.
Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it's going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it's not financial gain they're after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it's to hide something else they're doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.
The bots and scrapers are most definitely going after anything and everything - I’ve got about 10+ bots trying to scrape my site every day according to my logs. Quite honestly it shocked me considering I do zero SEO and it’s mostly random shit on my site.
There’s stuff being developed - ai robots blocklists, ai tar pits, poisoning the images and other media.
It’s a pita to implement a lot of this however, just for a small personal site.
I imagine a solution could be the same one from Web 1.0: webrings. Find one site on one and you’ve found a lot more interesting, curated ones as well.
Genesis web
It's called gopher and you don't used
[waves hand]
Call on me!! Call on me!!
Why not just make it 1998 and bring back Web Rings?
Problem solved
Web Rings were freaking awesome. I've recently discovered the Small Web tool from Kagi and it's basically a modern version of a web ring. It's pretty slick. www.kagi.com/smallweb if you're interested.
I've already seen people bringing back webrings