Small Web

02 Sep 2025

From a great blog post out of Fred Rocha’s website (you can read an interview with him in Portugueseto Fumaça - an indie investigative journalism podcast):

Posting on our own websites is the way we have to counter Big Tech / Social Media conglomerates. We should all be doing it. You own your content, and people can subscribe to it, and you can follow their blogs / websites / instances as well. The alternative is an amalgamation of “content” tailored to make the uber-rich richer, and the regular people slaves to the algorithms and screens.

The antidote to Big Tech is Small Tech, Tech for the greater good that is individually owned and controlled. The Small Technology Foundation (a tiny NGO by Laura Kalbag and Aral Balkan) is building the tools for it.

Instead of hosting your content on a Big Tech platform that tracks you and those who consume your content, you host it on your own website. It can be as simple as a blog (as this blog for example) or a more complex digital garden (which includes public and private sections, and different applications). Doing it using technology that you know and control (and that does not control you).

That does not mean that you cannot share your content and creation elsewhere. My next blog post will be on exactly that, syndication.

Digital Gardens

Digital gardens are a form of small web. Maggie (who also has a beautiful website) wrote an essay on the history of digital gardens.

These usually take the form of personal wikis, shared with the world - wikis built over time, from the readings of each person, aggregating and curating information that they absorbed. This also transposes to the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) world.

Home Servers and DIY

I like to expand the notion of Small Web beyond the content of the website, to include creating the code that runs such website (like this example) and even managing infrastructure where the website runs.

Why make a home server?

because I can and because it’s fun are honestly the two biggest reasons. Everything else is just icing on the cake. (user -defron- on r/HomeServer reddit community)

A very DIY approach. You can make a hobby out of it, and the ultimate goal is to have fun and learn something. Maybe after you can teach someone who is running an activist campaign or support a local association with their digital “stuff”.

Hosting this blog

This blog is hosted on GitHub. I intend to move it elsewhere later down the line when I have the time.

Some Small web examples that I like

• https://retiredparkingguard.com/ - the personal webpage of Tor Erlend Fjelde, a PhD student in the Computational and Biological Learning (CBL). His website shows his personal notes on a variety of topics (his personal Digital Garden)
• https://www.noel-friedrich.de/terminal/ - the personal website of Noel Friedrich, in the form of a terminal. There are hundreds of commands implemented, games to play, a true realm of DIY examples.
• https://maggieappleton.com/ - Maggie Appleton’s personal website, a digital garden with a lot of interesting essays and drawings.