Small Web
“Small Web” is a term which is used by different people to refer to slightly different visions of what the web should be. The thing uniting all of these visions is the kind of web they define themselves against: that kind of bloated, corporate, algorithm-ruled and ad-ridden mess which seems to make up the majority of high-traffic websites these days.
As someone who hates those kinds of websites, the Small Web is an idea which resonates with me. It’s basically the reason I’ve come back to keeping a personal website since 2020, experimented with the Gemini protocol, and use Mastodon as my main social media instead of something owned by Meta. I like the idea of the web as something built up by ordinary people, not mediated through what the capitalist class finds acceptable or wants to make a profit off. And I also like simple websites that load fast, degrade gracefully for people with slow or unusual setups, and don’t require the creator to have mastered convoluted Javascript frameworks or deployment pipelines. Making websites should be easy!
At any rate, as I mentioned, the term “Small Web” can have a bit of a different vibe depending on the person who’s using it. Broadly speaking I think there are three alternative visions for the web that it can refer to, and I’ll go through each of them below.
A late 90s style, hand-crafted web
For the well-known essay “Rediscovering the Small Web”, the “Small Web” refers to recapturing the magic of the late 1990s/early 2000s web, full of small-scale personal homepages and hobby sites, hand-crafted and manually coded by individuals. (Neopets, a website that was more my speed at the time, actually let users create one page like this for each of their pets, incentivising a whole generation of young people (mostly girls) to learn HTML to do so.) Often they’d be full of pixel art, flashing GIFs, occasionally garish colour schemes, and cover a whole range of topics down to the most obscure and eccentric. What united them is that the most fondly-remembered, at least, were real passion projects, labours of love.
At the time, people didn’t use CMSes like Wordpress to automate any part of managing their content, so content tended to be less strictly chronological and more likely to be organised by topic, the esteem the website creator held it in, etc. (There is another good essay, “How Blogs Broke the Web”, talking about the radical change that chronological organisation made to the structure of many websites.) A more “modern” spin on the non-chronological personal site might be the digital garden.
People were also more likely then to find new sites by following links on sites they already visited, or at least through a curated directory of sites, than by looking a term up in a search engine. There were also “webrings”, the idea of which being that you could hop from site to site all about a given topic or theme that the webring was organised around. Even once blogs existed, people would put together blogrolls listing other sites that they thought visitors should check out – still a human-scale web, I would say, not yet aggregated or algorithmed all to hell.
Finding these kinds of sites can be tough, especially if you’re looking for authentic 1990s sites and not retro callbacks. Even before Google’s recent pivot to letting AI summarise the web instead of actually linking you to websites, its algorithm had seemingly just blocked all webpages older than 10 years from appearing in search results. However, there are definitely some people still making and managing sites like this to this day. Neocities provides free hosting for a lot of them, and also has a website gallery to make it easier to explore its collection of retro-style websites. Nekoweb is another hosting provider which has got started in the last few years with a similar ethos. As far as search engines go, there is Wiby.me, which only indexes these kinds of sites (they even say they don’t want sites that use much CSS for styling). And if you just want to relive old memories and browse old sprites, buttons, “dolls”, “adoptables”, etc. then there are websites like “Nostalgia for the 2000s”, which have collected a whole lot of them.
I do think there’s a lot of romanticisation of this era of the internet. My recollection of it is that it was heavy on marquees, blinking things, and garish bright colours. If you did use a free website host in that era, it would generally insert obnoxious ads on your page – animated banner ads, popups, that kind of shit. I also think it’s a bit ridiculous to be anti-CSS, which was clearly an improvement on using tables or frames to code your layout. Standards around accessibility and readability have come a long way in 25 years. But I also think some of it is nostalgia (or, otherwise, a wistful longing for a time period someone missed out on) for an era when there were way more personal websites and people had fun creatively designing them (and enjoying other people’s creations!).
External links from this section:
Alternative protocols, like Gemini
Another interpretation of the “Small Web” concept is that it refers to the use of alternative protocols to the dominant HTTP(S), lightweight ones like the older Gopher and newer Gemini.
I have no real experience with Gopher, but I do have some with Gemini. Gemini pages are fast to load, because they cannot include scripts, stylesheets or even images (just links to images, although some clients have options to load these without leaving the page you’re on if you want). Because of the lack of scripting, your browsing across Gemini capsules can’t be tracked for purposes like targeted advertising. The protocol itself is much simpler than HTTP(S), to the point that it’s possible for programmers to “just slap together” a Gemini browser or server if they feel like it. It’s a protocol that is proudly for hobbyists and tinkerers, and pretty much useless if not actively hostile to major tech corporations.
There is some criticism of Gemini. The main one just seems to be, “What’s the point? If you want a super stripped-down website with no stylesheet, you can do that in HTML already.” I guess I have two responses to that: firstly, it’s not just about making stripped-down websites; it’s also about reading stripped-down websites. If you’re the kind of person who makes regular use of the Reader Mode feature of most web browsers to strip away certain obnoxious website layouts, you will instantly see the appeal of this feature. By taking styling out of the hands of site makers, it puts it into the hands of site browsers, who can configure their clients to use whatever fonts, colour schemes, etc. they prefer to read with. It can also just be nice to know it’s literally impossible for a Gemini site to inflict an autoplaying video, huge-filesize image or malicious Javascript on you. My second response is that not everything has to have a big-P Point anyway. Not everything has to be profitable, or have something concrete you want to get out of it, or whatever. Sometimes you can just muck around with something because it’s fun.
I guess another criticism of Gemini (which is kind of a self-reinforcing one) is that it’s a very niche thing, dominated by technical people who know how to run their own servers, and people can find it hard to find things they actually want to read. I think there is some truth to that. Services like Gemcities, Smol.pub and Flounder.online now make it easy for people to make their own Gemini sites without having to sysadmin a whole server, but I still feel like it’s not easy to “find your people” on Gemini if your primary interest is not operating Linux servers. This is quite likely because I just don’t know where to look, but I mean, if you have to be told by someone already in the know where to look, that’s a valid definition of “not easy”…
Anyway, I would not say that alternative protocols are the only rightful claimant of the “Small Web” label. I think you can have sites on the ordinary HTTPS internet that fit that label, too. Which brings me to the next section of this page…
An independent web
This vision of the Small Web is less restrictive than either of the other two, and refers more to a web made up of personal homepages, hobby sites, and small community sites, independent of the reach of the major tech giants. Some people also call this the Indie Web (and then there is THE IndieWeb, which is similar in vision, but doesn’t identify with the “Small Web” label particularly).
I guess where the Neocities crowd are looking back nostalgically at the late 90s/early 00s web, this group are looking back more fondly at the mid- to late-2000s, blog-dominated web (before people started ditching their personal blogs in favour of Twitter accounts and Tumblrs). Like the other camps, they don’t want to see a web dominated by a small number of tech giants, and see the value in individuals (and clubs, organisations, etc.) maintaining their own web presences, where they can’t get screwed by algorithms, falsely-issued DMCA take-downs and Community Guidelines that seem to get applied unfairly and without oversight. That doesn’t mean it’s always about self-hosting. Not everyone wants to manage that (although some people enjoy the challenge!). There’s a whole spectrum of approaches people can take, such as:
- signing up with a blogging provider that lets you quickly and easily start a blog (like Pika, Bearblog or Micro.blog)
- running a CMS like Wordpress on shared hosting (like NearlyFreeSpeech.net)
- using a static site generator (like Hugo or 11ty) to create static HTML pages from templates and content source files, then uploading those to a hosting provider (like NearlyFreeSpeech.net, or Neocities or Nekoweb also work for this)
- using a git provider in conjunction with your static site generator, so you can automatically deploy new commits to an integrated host
- paying for a VPS and using it as a web server (and maybe also a Gemini server, and whatever else you want)
- repurposing an old computer at home and using that as your web server (and Gemini server, etc.)
For the most part, advocates of this type of web also hate bloated websites, advertising, tracking scripts and all that garbage. There is a fantastic transcript-with-slides, “The Website Obesity Crisis”, which lays out really well just how unpleasant so much of the web had become to browse already by 2015. Things have got worse since then! Ads. Trackers. Embedded videos and huge-ass images that are totally unnecessary. Personally I also hate those interstitials that pop up and nag me to sign up to some marketing email list. I’ve read multiple good pieces about why the overuse of Javascript (and the failure to degrade gracefully), specifically, is a problem.
It’s not that my vision of the Small Web involves zero Javascript. Sometimes a little script is lightweight and helpful – blurring out spoilers, for example, or adding lightboxes for a gallery of images, or letting people read footnotes in a pop-up box rather than having them jump up and down the page. These are all things I’ve used Javascript for. They key things are that they don’t bog down the whole webpage’s loading times, they don’t reimplement something that could be done just as well or better in plain HTML/CSS, and they degrade gracefully if Javascript isn’t enabled.
As a side note, there are some websites/pages which are basically applications coded in Javascript and manage to FEEL lightweight, nonetheless. It’s no longer being maintained, but the Pinafore web client for Mastodon was a perfect example of this. It loaded fast, fell back to showing cached content if your internet connection was lost, took accessibility seriously, and didn’t break basic features of the web browser like the back button. It is possible to create things like this which I think are compatible with the “Small Web”. They’re not part of the bloated, algorithmic, half-broken web, like the vast majority of web apps written in Javascript. In many cases I wonder how those web apps got so bad – many of them worked way better in 2009! And that reminds me of the article “The Bullshit Web”, which talked about modern websites increasing in size and bloat at the same pace as home broadband connections have improved their download speeds. But it shouldn’t be that way!
External links from this section:
“Modern” web design antipatterns
Maybe we could tone down the Javascript
Conclusion
For me, the Small Web has two major themes: independence from Big Tech capitalists (which means carving out space for personal websites or small online communities), and pages which themselves are literally small in filesize, load time, etc., whether you deliver them over the normal HTTPS internet protocol or an inherently lightweight protocol like Gemini or Gopher. Those tie in pretty naturally with a hobby of making a personal website.
I can also appreciate a bit of nostalgia for the early 00s web of my childhood, and I like the more tasteful callbacks to that aesthetic. Pixel art and the like! And I certainly agree that the fundamentals of good web design are still HTML, CSS, and just a little bit of Javascript as a treat. At least, unless you’re building a web app which really needs to be highly dynamic, in which case you should make sure to write GOOD Javascript.
Clearly I’m not creating a highly dynamic web app here, but a personal site filled with pages on topics I personally find interesting. That’s a pretty simple goal that shouldn’t require bloated frameworks or convoluted publication pipelines. Right now, I’m aiming to publish a Gemini capsule version of this site, and use Weblog.lol to publish a lightweight HTML version. Both versions should load fast and put the focus on ease of reading, as it should be.
Finally, a little shout-out to communities I know of who are helping to build the Small Web (as I think of it) today:
First published 2021-07-03. Updated 2026-08-18.
jayeless.flounder.online/