Invasive tracking and pay-for-play search engines has broken the internet. It’s time to reclaim our independence with the Small Web.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Honestly the hardest part of doing this seems to be settling on what we're going to call it. Ironically, it is difficult to search for and discover sites following this philosophy precisely because they are so decentralized and independent and nobody's even using any common terminology for it. I've heard variations of this called Web 1.0, Small Web, Indie Web, Nostalgia Web, Old Web, Retro Web, Analog Web, Free Web, Libre Web, and dozens more terms even more vague and difficult to remember off the top of my head. "Small Web" seems to have the most traction from what I can tell but discovery remains such a hard problem to solve, especially without falling into the same traps that led us here.
To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren't focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.
Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can't produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can't bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won't have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.
The bots and scrapers are most definitely going after anything and everything - I’ve got about 10+ bots trying to scrape my site every day according to my logs. Quite honestly it shocked me considering I do zero SEO and it’s mostly random shit on my site.
There’s stuff being developed - ai robots blocklists, ai tar pits, poisoning the images and other media.
It’s a pita to implement a lot of this however, just for a small personal site.