All the Smolwebs

I hate the Internet

Let me rephrase that; I hate what the Internet has become and I blame us for allowing it to happen, so I want to try and join a movement that is attempting to give the power back to the users as a way of atoning for my own failure to stop this privacy-violating, human-exploiting, misinformation-generating dumpster fire we are calling "the Internet."

Deep breath.

Before we begin, it is probably important to mention some basic axioms that seem to serve me well in our digital Information Age.

1. If an organization has the ability to exploit a resource for profit, they will.
2. If the punishment is a fine, then it is only illegal for those who cannot pay.
3. It is okay to be wrong, but It is not okay to stay that way.
4. Accountability is the only form of ownership left to us.
5. Convenience is both a selling point and a security risk.

Things have gotten pretty bad online and I will probably explore that in future posts because the direction the Internet is headed is a huge concern to me, since I consider myself a citizen of it. I am not particularly interested in imposing my ideals on anyone else, though. You use the Internet as you see fit for your wants and needs. For my own part, as time has worn on in this Fragmented Future, I find myself having a visceral reaction to just how far into the pit we have fallen. I bought into it for years, despite my own distrust of any profit-seeking entity, despite my hesitation to adopt new technologies that promised so much for so little. It feels shameful to admit that I was fooled by mind-hacking capitalistic strategies that were wrapped in a pretty bow of user convenience or cloaked in a trench coat of "safety," but as they say on the Hacking Humans podcast, "we don't get fooled because we're stupid; we get fooled because we're human."

There is light, smol as it may be.

When I started considering a return to blogging after more than a decade hiatus, I found that my goals had changed from what they were in my younger days. Back then, I kept a LiveJournal and re-published on a few other sites because I wanted to get noticed and possibly get paid to write for a tech publication. I wasn't interested in web development, so any service that offered to make publishing my content as easy as possible was what I wanted. These days, I have lessons learned from being burned, I know at least some rudimentary coding in a few languages and have a drive to not only create human-generated content, but to have more control over the environment in which it is published due to a variety of online practices I now disagree with.

Enter the smolweb movement.

Being new to this, the smolweb movement appears to be a nebulous collection of like-minded individual content creators that are simply fed up Web 2.0 and want to return to Web 1.0. The more I read about this movement, the more I realize my interests align with it.

In the interest of promoting a few examples, here's a list of spaces where one can experience what I would call smol or smallweb life:

• The Tildeverse - each 'tilde' can be thought of as its own community, losely gathering like-minded people while remaining open and connected to other communities.
• SDF - The gold star example of a Public Access Unix System (Pubnix) that starts with a shell account on a shared BSD system.
• Neocities - a wonderful revival of the old days when Geocities ruled and web content was hyper-personalized
• Indieweb.org - The true tinkers of the movement, this group promotes independent web content with the guiding principles of owning your data, making your own tools and longevity.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive, but I think it provides a good model of what a new-comer can expect should they want to start moving away from the Corporate Web. They are different communities, to be sure, but share a lot of the same DNA, most of which centers around working with shared systems, self-publishing, creator control and dated but extremely reliable methodologies that give power back to the user. When you find yourself tired of the perpetual on-rails feeling of modern GUIs and prescribed software on operating systems that tend to focus more on flash rather than function, these are the communnities you turn to.

There are guidelines for creating webspaces that are "smolweb or small web compliant" but agreement across communities about what this means is fuzzy, at best. I would also argue that fuzziness is intentional. The framework, if we can borrow the term, is in place to serve as a guideline as opposed to a rule so that creators can bring their own opinions to the table...so long as those opinions ignore Corporate Web demands and interests. This website (futz.tech) may not necessarily qualify as "smolweb compliant" to someone who has a slightly different take on what that means, but there is more than enough for us to agree on. And thus, community is born.

My own take on what it means to be a smolweb developer follows:

• No "Growth at all Costs" bullshit. Scale is not a goal. Analytics are not a goal. Data harvesting is not a goal.
• Accessibility and accommodation are priorities. The site and content should be usable on older hardware, alternative browsers and work for individuals using screen readers. Presentation should take neurodivergences into consideration as much as possible.
• Code should be clean, concise, correctly implemented without bloat. It should also be open for review and corrected when necessary.

Sophomoric though it may be, it is still a framework within which to begin operating. In fact, I do not think futz.tech fully complies with my own framework at the moment, but it will as I experiment and learn what works and what does not. One of my biggest concerns is readability, especially on smartphones. As I age, my far-sightedness gets worse, so being able to resize text on a web page to my specifications as a reader is important. I'm experimenting with font sizes and relative units like em in my CSS and you might see the look and feel of the site change slightly now and then. As always, I'm open to suggestions from more experienced developers or folks using screen readers.

It should be noted that my take does not necessarily agree with, say, that of Adële of Smolweb.org or others participating in the smolweb/small web movement and is not meant to be contrary to theirs in any way. They are smart, motivated people and you should probably consider their words more than mine (links below). This is simply my current understanding as applies to meager skills I can bring to the table. One of the better ways to really be part of a community is to watch for awhile, looking for those places where you fit in without compromising your own principles. This can be difficult, the temptation to just jump right in, but if there's one thing I took away from RTFM culture, it's that if you truly want to contribute to something, you have to understand what it's about, first.

In my lurking over the years, resulting in eventual participation, I have learned the general ethos is this; Content for humans by humans, without exploitative bloat. The only reason a modern laptop needs the ridiculous minimum of 4GB of memory to allow a user to look at a website without wanting to pull their hair out is the god damned data-exploiting bloat of Web 2.0. I come from an era in computing when the objective was to get the best possible performance from the least amount of hardware, not the other way around as is so commonly encountered today, so it is frustrating to watch less savvy users just be okay with this, investing needlessly in higher powered hardware because they think they need Facebook in their lives, their actions contributing to the growing problem of eWaste and privacy encroachment respectively.

At the moment, I remain flexible with the future of futz.tech, hesitant to define it too rigidly because that tends to get me into trouble. A few core tenets are necessary, I think, but I will need to allow room for things to grow naturally while keeping my purposes in mind. Every clay pot starts as a useless blob, I suppose.

I appreciate you reading. Since I am not interested in implementing a comments section on these posts (yet), you are welcome to email me your thoughts, should you be inclined. Talking to people with different experience and talents than me is a good thing.