What is the Small Web?

tallwookie, 10 months ago

The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit.

• tell me you’re literally making shit up without telling me.

actual, reliable source

sik0fewl, 10 months ago

While I have no doubt that that etymology is completely made up, Wikipedia is not an "actual, reliable source".

LostXOR, 10 months ago

It's certainly more reliable than "ar.al".

kjr, 10 months ago

@sik0fewl why not?

@wave_walnut @tallwookie

sik0fewl, 10 months ago

Here's why Wikipedia itself claims not to be a reliable source - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source

Pons_Aelius, 10 months ago

Wikipedia is not an "actual, reliable source".

Why not? It has been more reliable than most anything else for more than a decade.

What is a reliable online source for you?

yaomtc, 10 months ago

Wikipedia is not itself a source. It's a way to get a summary of a topic and to get the actual sources

Pons_Aelius, 10 months ago

True but that is its strength and makes it a defacto source.

The references provided to back the statements in the articles are its real raison d'être.

Combine that with its editing practices, and we have the reason it has maintained its reasonably good quality for so long.

It is not always the answer, but it is the best place to start looking for the answer.

sik0fewl, 10 months ago

It was linked to as an "actual, reliable source" when it is likely a tertiary source at best.

I did skim the references and there was nothing to support any other claim on the etymology. If I missed something, please let me know.

luthis, 10 months ago

Yeah I had to do a ‘wtf’ then as well. We had ‘users’ before we had internet -_-

Pons_Aelius, 10 months ago

Exactly, "users" goes back to the main frame days of the '60s when the users were all part of a company or university.

trynn, 10 months ago

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen lately. I assume whoever is behind this is relatively new to the Internet, because the "small web" has been how the Internet has worked for decades now. We've been able to have our own web presence nearly since the web was invented in the early 90s, and affordable self-hosting has been available since the late 90s. Furthermore, the claims on that site that "all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web" is so divorced from reality it's astounding. The Internet largely relies on open source software and frameworks that have been developed over decades by volunteers.

If you want to have your own "small web" presence on the Internet, there's nothing that's stopping you. You could've set that up a long, long time ago using open-source software on cheap hosting providers. The problem with the so-called "small web" is that you usually also want to interact with other people when online, and that's why things have gotten centralized over the years.

sparseMatrix, 10 months ago

@wave_walnut

This is brilliant. You're promoting something here to which you didn't provide a (very visible?) link. I can't find one, anyway. I guess I'll just use my imagination and context to think about what OP might have been posting about.

myofficialaccount, 10 months ago

The whole subject line is "the link", as it is in every other post to external resources. At least I guess that the page I just read after clicking the link wasn't just my imagination.

If you're using a non-feature-complete mobile app your milage my vary - but that's not OP's fault.

luthis, 10 months ago

Wasn’t this the intention of the web originally? I’m sure I remember reading about netscape and people hosting their own websites locally…

Pons_Aelius, 10 months ago

That was the original plan. One thing that screwed with it was ADSL with very low upload speeds.

If you are self-hosting, you need a symmetrical connection as you are sending the site to everyone who visits. If you are using the net only to consume (download) it is not as important.

luthis, 10 months ago

True, the ability to effectively serve content was outpaced by the ability to make harder to serve content. But not anymore! For people with good connections anyway.

guyrocket, 10 months ago

Wouldn't it be great if the FCC (or whoever) forced ISPs to only sell symmetrical service?

luthis, 10 months ago

It’s not possible everywhere. Copper line physically can’t be for the end user, same with satellite and rural broadband. Fibre is pretty much the only thing that can be symmetrical. Unless you get some symmetrically shit ADSL.

briongloid, 10 months ago

Or Australian post-adsl2, which still has slow upload speeds, I have a gigabit plan which is basically 800/44

100mbps up would cost $250 instead of my $130pm and would cut the download by -67% to 250mbps.

Pons_Aelius, 10 months ago

Yep. Not being symmetrical when on fibre in insane.

The sad part is you would be better off with 200/200 than either plan listed, and it would be less work on the network side to provision.