Five years ago I started blogging. I ran a Jekyll site, tried Medium, Dev.to and finally settled on Substack a few years ago. Recent insights made me reconsider—I’ve come full circle, back to a static site. Why? Because of the values of the so-called Small Web.

I encountered the term Small Web in a series of blog posts1, I couldn’t put it out of my head. It resonated deeply; I wanted to be part of it.

What is the Small Web? Quite literally the antithesis of the Big Web. Whereas the Big Web is centralized and aimed at maximizing profits at the expense of its users, the Small Web is decentralized and all about openness, freedom and creative self-expression. But there’s more to it.

Simplicity and Minimalism

As Ben Hoyt mentions in his essay “The Small Web is Beautiful”, the Small Web differentiates itself with its simplicity and minimalism, focusing on content. Many sites on the Small Web are built with plain HTML, CSS whilst JavaScript is kept to a minimum. This results in fast load-times, low-bandwidth usage, high accessibility and an overall pleasant reader experience. There’s even a category of people taking this to the extreme with so-called “text-only” sites, which I agree on with Alban Brooke, have their own charm.

Along the way we seem to have forgotten that content is what it should be all about. Words impacting its readers. There are many flashy sites out there with tons of bells and whistles, but in the end it’s not the sleek design that makes readers come back to a site, it’s the content. I can think of no better way this has been said than in this hilarious piece of satire2.

I made the same mistake. Five years ago, when I launched my blog I focused a lot on aesthetics, and wanted my blog to look good. Looking good to me meant lots of colors, images, emojis—all of it. I probably spent more time tweaking my blog’s looks than it’s content.

All that fancy stuff distracts me when I visit a site. Anything impeding my understanding of an author’s point should be removed. In fact, I do this a lot with Reader Mode in my browser. In this funny post Herman Martinus makes the point that Reader mode is a testimony to how horrible the modern web has become for written content. A sad truth indeed.

As for me, moving back to a static site gives me the control to bring my blog back to the essentials: my words.

Own It

Running a blog on a big-web platform like Substack or Medium is trivial, but you never own it. The content might be yours, but the platform is theirs. Their platform, their rules. Even if you like the platform now, you might not like its course in the future.

For instance, Medium has put up increasingly more paywalls over the years as well as put articles behind login walls. What if you want your content to be available to everyone? Or what if, like on Substack, there are these constant newsletter pop-ups or banners to download the app and you don’t want to annoy your readers with them?

You have to play by the platform’s rules. With any platform you’re in the passenger seat regarding where it’s heading, and you might not like where it goes.

As Aral Balkan says in his post on the Small Web:

On the Big Web, you never own your own home. You must rent your home from Megacorps. Most often, you don’t have to pay for your home using money. You pay for it by forfeiting your privacy, freedom of speech, and your other human rights. Collectively, we pay for it by forfeiting a democratic future.

And no, not all platforms are bad. For instance, a platform such as Bear Blog has a humanistic set of values and gets my endorsement.

Furthermore, these big platforms enable those without the know-how or need3 to own their blog to still share their genuine thoughts with the world. That in and of itself is worth a lot.

As for me, I want to own what I write. I want to decide what I can or cannot do with my content and my site.

DIY

Big tech platforms have an alluring proposition: they make things convenient. They make it trivial to publish content. You deliver the content, they take care of the technical stuff.

It works. You don’t have to worry about optimizing your site for performance4 or security. You don’t have to painstakingly create a design that works well on mobile and desktop, or handle any technical upgrades. In all honesty this is why I ditched my initial setup in the first place.

Convenient as this may be, it robs you of the opportunity to do things yourself. There’s a lot of fun to be had in a bit of DIY. Knowing exactly how your site works, building things just the way you like them, and learning a ton along the way. Doing it yourself makes it yours. You can take pride in it. If you’ve got the time and skill, tinkering with something that’s your own can be incredibly satisfying.

Despite not having as much time as I used to for tinkering on my site—having two kids will do that—I still enjoy it every once in a while. Right now I’m rolling with a stock Jekyll theme, but I intend to tinker with it or build something from scratch. The Small Web, perhaps because of its simplicity, makes it way more fun to play around with.

Privacy

In his essay “Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web”, Parimal Satyal explains how the web has progressed technically, but declined morally. It’s lost its humanity. A particularly painful example of this is how the Big Web treats its users—you and me.

Much of the Big Web engages in so-called surveillance capitalism5. Surveillance capitalism is where the platform tracks your online activity in order to commoditize your personal data.

Why?

Because they can turn it into money—lots of it. Take Google for instance. The data they collect of your online activities is used to build an incredibly accurate personal profile, which they in turn sell to advertisers. These advertisers can then show hyper personalized ads.

We’ve become so accustomed to online tracking and surveillance capitalism that many people no longer consider it creepy, but simply as “the price to pay to enjoy online services.” It’s not okay though. Surveillance capitalism IS creepy, it is invasive and it is disrespectful to fellow human beings.

Platforms don’t start out disrespecting their users, but usually end up doing so through a process called “enshitification”. Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, describes the process as follows:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Big blogging platforms aren’t as bad as the Google’s, Meta’s and Amazon’s of this world, but they still need data to operate. They need it to personalize your feeds, make tailored recommendations, and much more because these platforms thrive on engagement.

I would prefer not to6 partake in this creepy part of the web. Taking control back into my own hands allows me to choose privacy-friendly alternatives for my needs7, or get rid of things altogether8, such as annoying cookie notices and subscribe-to-the-newsletter pop-ups. In the end it’s about respect. Respect for those of you who spend your precious time reading what I write9.

Summary

When I initially drafted this essay I had no idea what it was about the Small Web that lighted a fire in me. During writing, as writing does, I realized what it was: I align with its humanity, openness and good intentions.

That’s why I decided to be a part of it with this blog. Though my site is but a speck of dust in the grand universe that is the internet, it’s still one that changed for the better. Here’s to a resurgence of the Small Web.

  1. The rabbit hole opened for me at Kagi’s Small Web project, and it’s accompanying blog post. I’ve been reading a ton of small web posts via Kagi Small Web ever since, and wholeheartedly recommend it. Speaking of which, I’ve also been using the Kagi Search Engine for a few months now and have loved it from the start. Be sure to check it out! ↩

  2. If you’ve ever done any web development this will crack you up, I sure had a laugh. In all seriousness though, the piece has a point, we’ve made the web hard ourselves. ↩

  3. Yes, I realize I’m weird like that. Though if you’ve read this far I reckon you might be a little too. And, as it turns out there’s a big community of people who feel the same. Be sure to check out the Indieweb project. ↩

  4. Although, as we’ve seen, you could argue the complexity of optimizing web performance is a position we’ve gotten ourselves into in the first place. ↩

  5. A great book on the topic, and more specifically how the internet age impacts how we engage with each other, it’s effect on truth and even democracy itself is Byung-Chul Han’s Infocracy. ↩

  6. “I would prefer not to” has become the motto/meme of famed philosopher Slavoj Žižek. He uses it a stronger negation than “no”, rejecting the entire underlying system with it instead. ↩

  7. For instance instead of Google Analytics, I now use GoatCounter, a privacy-friendly alternative for basic site analytics. Just like GoatCounter’s Author Martin Tournoij mentions in this post, I’m also not interested in vanity metrics, but I do want to have some sense of my readership. ↩

  8. For instance, I no longer run comments on my site, and instead encourage readers to e-mail me. This sheds JavaScript, Cookies and comment-spam. I also no longer run a newsletter, but promote following me using my RSS feed. ↩

  9. Only slightly related, but I resonate a lot with Soophie Koonin’s post “This website is for humans” where she explains that AI is increasingly used to read content and serve it up (or gobble it up and regurgitate whatever it makes of it) to humans, instead of humans visiting the sites themselves. I too write to touch the heart of others, not some emotionless LLM utilized for profit. ↩