No, the small web is not the same as it was. It used to be that a decent amount of people documenting certain hobbies were documenting it on the small web, but the generation that aged out was never replaced; all the younger people are on corporate social media. It used to be that independent MovableType or Wordpress blogs on polemic topics were substantially read, enough to make an impact in the real world on small-town politics or religious denominations, but today relatively few people would even visit independent websites or care for that kind of long-form text.

I would love to participate in a small-web ecosystem, both as reader and writer, on many of the subjects that interest me, but I know for a fact that that ecosystem just doesn’t exist any more.

Sorry, this got rantier and longer than intended. This isn't meant to be a disagreement just a worry that switching to the old parts might not be the solution.

There are more problems though. In the country where I live even if you want to make just a tiny website for family and friends you essentially have to set yourself up for doxxing. You are required to put your real name on, as well as city and in case of something like a blog the whole address.

Which is absolutely horrible, especially if you want to do an honest blog about your life and such and not just trying to do self-advertisement.

I think what Facebook, etc. killed is "pseudonymity by default". Everyone started publishing under their full name and include a photo of oneself, while only a couple of years earlier people were skeptical about things like revealing their real address for online shopping.

That said on parts of the Usenet, etc. it was also common to do that, but way back when internet came into our household, we made a basic little family site. Today that would be unthinkable, because of regulations that are justified with "safety reasons".

Sure, one can get around that. Confirming some blog is by an individual living in your jurisdiction isn't always an easy task, but a big part of the old internet was that you could do the equivalent of going to a pub or a coffee shop, having a conversation with total strangers, on relatively private topics on a first name basis without plastering your private details on the wall for the public and creeps to see. Or for someone who disagrees with your views/sexual orientation/favorite sports team to look you up. Imagine if the KKK had a simple way of doing that.

And there are whole websites dedicated to doxxing and harassing people. Never has it been so trivial to get this kind of information, all because of effectively surveillance laws created under the claim of being made to protect people. As well as for websites to also "rank" you.

All while we can't even manage to prevent banks from moving money to other banks that allow for incredibly shady customers. All while people pretend that it's impossible to find perpetrators of heinous crimes that post photos and oftentimes don't use anonymity software or do so incompetently. All while people pretend that playing roblox or something is the biggest present day threat to children, while being completely fine of spreading photos daily life over the internet, giving a fuck about lead poisoning, climate change, etc.

There are so many laws in place right now that only a couple of years ago China was scolded for and yet politics and media make it sound like the threat is bigger than ever.

It feels like it's time to reverse many of these laws, because these they they are mainly protecting the monopolies and oligopolies of these "biggest websites".

We live in a bizarre world. And it's not like people didn't see that coming. Just nobody cared or cares now, but oh how horrible everything is.

So yes, there are remnants of the small web, but I do think that should they become more relevant again there just will be more UK Online Safety Act nonsense killing the small web for good.

The legal system seems to largely assume that you are a company like the big ones now and it's becoming harder to even if you had commercial interest to set up a presence without the help of the big ones. As outlined things are also a lot harder now for just the most basic private use case.

to continue on the theme, the internet is a sewer, mostly filled with shit, but that has a few other pipes as part of the network , but which unfortunatly require a certain amount of swimming to get to.