Honey I shrunk the web!
The future of the usable web lies in its past...?
For the last while I've been developing a strong love of the small web (and the smolweb). Let me explain why and exactly what they are, but first let's look at where we are right now.
Think of your general every day experience on modern websites while simply browsing the web:
- Ads.
- AI slop.
- Commercialised crap.
- Egregious data brokerage.
- Tracking pixels.
- More ads.
- AI Chatbots.
- Privacy-defying cookie notices.
- "Sign up to read the rest of this article".
- Graphically-heavy yet vacuous "style" over substance.
- Vibe coded garbage.
- Autoplaying videos.
- Even More ads.
- Pop ups.
- Paywalls.
- Dark Patterns.
- Invitations to sign up for their "newsletter".
- JavaScript blocking pages because of your ad-blocker blocking their ads.
- Ads everywhere.
- ADS ADS ADS ADS ADS ADS ADS...
ARRRGGGGHHHHHHH!!!
What is this small web, or smolweb?
Part nostalgia, part effort at sanity restoration, they're both a movement and a tangible effort to escape this ongoing enshittification of the current web.
I'll use the terms interchangeably throughout this post, and there are other terms represented by them like indie web, personal web etc, but what do the terms smolweb and small web mean exactly?
Technically they can be thought of as two separate, but similar concepts:
The small web is an effort by folks who are fed up of the commercialisation of the web. By corporate efforts to sanitise, censor, monetise and extract as much "value" out of you as possible.
The small web movement is fighting back with simplicity, friendliness, ease of use, clarity, kindness, and a more personal, grounded version of the web.
The small web is the antithesis of all of the noise of the 2026 web experience. Think how the World Wide Web as it used to be in the late 90's or early 2000's:
- Geocities
- Plain text webpages
- Personal Blogs!
- Blogrolls/web-rings
- Static HTML sites
- Hand-coding your website with Notepad
- FTP-ing files to your web-host's server
- No cookies
- No ads
- Old school forums
A time when a post to your blog could be anything from one sentence updates, to entire chapters of your latest My Little Pony epic NSFW fanfic.
A glorious, golden age of simplicity, of necessarily small webpages and sites crafted to be as efficient as possible to download quickly on a 56k modem or the likes. Which is a perfect segue into...
The smolweb
This movement is more focused on size. The effort to deliver a webpage as efficiently and as small as possible. About being technically tiny, with a leaning towards being cute with it.
There are web-rings out there with tonnes of websites that come in at less than 1mb, 512kb, or 250kb! Hell, there's even one out there for the 1kb club!
Now obviously the further down the rungs you go on that particular ladder, the less content there's going to be on a given page, by design. But the smolweb movement is inherently a part of the small web movement.
Adële's blog post below goes into a bit more depth on this overall topic, and was my inspiration to get this down in my own words:
What it means to me
The Small Web effort to me is largely a nostalgic one. I remember coding hand-built websites with notepad when I was in my early 20's at the birth of the popular web, in the mid-90's. The feeling of writing a page in html (and later adding CSS) and uploading it to a web-host usually hosted/run at that time by your ISP, and seeing it living in your web browser was a thing of beauty.
30+ years later and that excitement has never changed, but the work and the platforms have. Now I'm more into self-hosting, owning my presence on the web in a way that I haven't done in decades.
Short tangent: Owning my own mastodon server has been a source of great joy over the past few months since I launched it. The fact that I'm beholden to no-one and I have the entire responsibility for running and maintaining the service, gives me an immense feeling of satisfaction and pride. The fact that this is mine, and mine alone?
*Chef's kiss*
Obviously over the past several years I've been dipping my toes back into the waters of static html sites, experimenting with Publii and Netlify's free hosting, but convenience won out in the end, and I ended up obviously going with Ghost as a blog platform, with Mastodon serving as my main social media and micro-blogging platform.
However it still brings me a lot of joy finding yet another small web website with content I enjoy reading, such as the one by Adële, linked above.
I've been thinking of implementing a list of blogs that I enjoy reading that fall into the small web/smolweb categories on its own dedicated page here, and that's something I intend to look into doing over the next few weeks & months.
Admittedly this site doesn't qualify as a smolweb site, but it does qualify as a small web website, being a personal blog, owned and written by lil' old me all on my own-some.
If you're intrigued by the concept of the small web, you could do worse than to browse through the web-ring hosted by Kagi, who incidentally are still my search engine of choice these days. Now admittedly, some of the sites shown by the Kagi carousel aren't what I would actually consider to be small web, but a decent chunk of them are, so it's well worth a browse.
This will give you a good feel for the small web, as well as any of the blogs hosted by the likes of bear blog, micro.blog, Neocities or mataroa.blog.
My advice? Get a feel for it, and sign up for a free account on one of the above, and start a site! No-one has to know about it, it can be just for you and you alone. Or you can publicise the hell out of it, it's up to you! Hell, start more than one! Have a different blog for individual specific topics if you like!
Nothing stopping you! 😁
