The claim that the small web is bigger than most people assume tends to get read as a traffic argument. Personal websites don’t need to match YouTube or Twitter on pageviews to be significant, though, and measuring them that way misses what the independent web constructed over the past decade while most observers were writing it off.
What “Small” Actually Means
The term is loose by design. “Small web” typically covers personal websites, independent blogs, hand-crafted HTML pages, and anything that lives outside the commercial platforms. The defining characteristic is what it isn’t: not social media, not a product trying to capture attention and convert it into revenue, not infrastructure owned by a publicly traded company.
The historical reference point is GeoCities, which Yahoo killed in 2009 after accumulating roughly 38 million user-built pages. GeoCities was visually chaotic and technically unsophisticated, but it represented genuine participation: people made things. The shift from building personal sites to posting on platforms happened gradually between 2005 and 2015 as Facebook, Twitter, and eventually Instagram absorbed the publishing energy that had previously gone into personal HTML.
The Protocols the IndieWeb Built
What makes the current moment more interesting than a nostalgia wave is the technical infrastructure that formed around the independent web. IndieWeb is the most organized expression of the counter-movement, starting around 2011 as a community of developers who wanted to own their content rather than publish it into silos. Its core principle is POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Your website is the canonical record; cross-posting to Mastodon or LinkedIn is distribution, not publishing.
IndieWeb produced several specifications that became W3C standards.
WebMention became a W3C Recommendation in 2017. When your blog links to someone else’s post, your server sends a POST request to their webmention endpoint, notifying them of the reference. They verify the mention by fetching your page and confirming the link is present, then can display it as a comment, reply, or reaction. The verification step prevents forgery without shared secrets or OAuth flows. webmention.io handles the receiving end as a service, and webmention.rocks provides a validation environment for testing implementations. Static site generators like Eleventy and Hugo have plugins that pull WebMentions into builds at compile time, so a site with no client-side JavaScript can still display cross-site replies.
Micropub is a W3C Recommendation that defines an API for publishing to personal websites. The separation it creates is meaningful: your site implements the endpoint, and any client that speaks the spec can post to it. Mobile apps, desktop editors, and command-line scripts work with any Micropub-compliant site without custom integrations.
IndieAuth turns your domain name into an identity. You prove ownership of a URL by controlling what appears at that URL, typically via a <link> tag pointing to an authorization server. No separate identity provider required beyond the domain itself.
Gemini: Redesigning the Protocol Layer
A different thread within the independent web rejected the HTTP stack entirely. The Gemini protocol was created around 2019 by someone using the handle Solderpunk. The design goal was a network protocol for text-first content, one that removed the features HTTP accumulated over thirty years of incremental extension.
Gemini uses TLS on port 1965 with no unencrypted transport option. A request is a single line containing the full URL followed by CRLF. The response is a status code, a content type or redirect URL, and then the body. No headers beyond the status line. The content type for native Gemini documents is text/gemini, a line-oriented format with six link types and no inline markup:
20 text/gemini
# Page Title
This is body text. Links are on their own lines.
=> https://example.com An external link
=> /another-page An internal linkA minimal Gemini server is around 50 lines of Python. The spec document is short enough to read in a single sitting. The simplicity is deliberate: the protocol cannot be extended to carry JavaScript, cannot embed tracking pixels, and cannot be made to execute arbitrary code in the client.
These constraints carry real weight for certain use cases. Forms require a round trip: the server sends a status 10 (INPUT) response, the client prompts the user for text, and the client resends the request with that text appended to the URL as a query string. Images exist only as links, never inline. Gemini is unsuitable for any kind of interactive application.
For long-form writing and technical publishing, those constraints vanish into irrelevance. geminispace.info indexes tens of thousands of “capsules” as of early 2026, covering personal journals, programming documentation, fiction, and technical reference material. Content loads instantly on any hardware because there is nothing to parse beyond plain text.
Neocities and the New GeoCities Generation
Neocities launched in 2013 as an explicit successor to GeoCities, providing free static site hosting with a browser-based HTML editor and social features including following and a browse feed. It has accumulated over 800,000 sites, though the active fraction is considerably smaller.
The demographic is worth noting. Neocities attracted a cohort of younger creators who learned HTML to make something that wasn’t a social profile. The aesthetic is deliberately retro: animated GIFs, visitor counters, tiled backgrounds, color schemes that would have looked at home in 1998. This isn’t technical naivety but an explicit aesthetic position. The early web’s visual language reads as personal and handmade; modern platform design reads as uniform and managed by committee.
The sites themselves range from personal journals and fan wikis to art portfolios and game shrines. Some are technically sophisticated, built with custom CSS grid layouts and JavaScript animation. Others are proudly minimal, a few hundred lines of HTML and no external dependencies.
Web Bloat Created the Opening
Part of why the independent web maintained its foothold is that the commercial web became progressively hostile to simple participation. The HTTP Archive, which has been crawling a large sample of the web since 2010, shows the median desktop page weight growing from roughly 900KB in 2012 to over 2.3MB by 2023. Most of that growth came from JavaScript, third-party tracking scripts, and advertising infrastructure, not content.
Publishing anything on the mainstream web now involves performance budgets, Core Web Vitals optimization, cookie consent compliance frameworks, and the expectation that content is rendered client-side from a JavaScript bundle. A static HTML page with actual content in the HTML source feels like an aberration because the platform tooling ecosystem evolved around different incentives.
The small web ignores most of this. A personal site built with Eleventy and deployed to Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages is free to host, fast to load, and requires no server process, no database, and no runtime. The operational cost approaches zero, which matters for content that someone wants to maintain for years without ongoing attention.
RSS Was Never Actually Dead
The canonical narrative holds that RSS died when Google shut down Google Reader in 2013. What happened was more limited: one dominant aggregator went away, and casual readers left with it. The RSS infrastructure itself remained intact.
Podcasting, which expanded dramatically between 2014 and 2020, ran entirely on RSS throughout that period. Every podcast episode is an RSS item with an enclosure element pointing to an audio file. When Spotify moved to bring podcasting inside a walled garden, it still had to support RSS imports because the ecosystem was too large to override.
Independent blogs continued publishing RSS and Atom feeds. Newsletter platforms including Substack publish machine-readable feeds by default. Self-hosted readers like Miniflux, a Go application with a clean REST API, and client applications like NetNewsWire built a distributed replacement for the centralized aggregator model. The result is a consumption layer that nobody controls and nobody can shut off by retiring a single product.
For a developer looking to consume content programmatically, RSS is often the cleanest integration target on the web. No authentication, no API terms of service, structured XML with predictable semantics, and content that is meant to be read by machines.
What Developers Can Build Against
The practical implication is that the independent web is more accessible as an integration target than the commercial social platforms. WebMention endpoints are discoverable via <link rel="webmention"> tags in page headers. Micropub APIs follow a standard with multiple open-source implementations. RSS is parseable by any HTTP library in any language. Gemini is a protocol you can write a client for in an afternoon, with no OAuth, no API keys, and no terms of service to review before you start.
For building tools around personal publishing, the stack is unusually open. There are no API tiers, no follower count requirements for access, no policy reviews. The content tends to be licensed permissively because the culture expects sharing and linking. Contrast this with the last decade of commercial platform API history: Twitter’s multiple API shutdowns and tier changes, Facebook’s progressive closing of its social graph, the general movement toward walled gardens that monetize access to their own data.
Kevin Boone’s argument that the small web is larger than its reputation gets stronger when you measure by infrastructure rather than traffic. W3C-standardized cross-site protocols, a clean-slate alternative protocol with tens of thousands of active capsules, community hosting platforms with hundreds of thousands of sites, and a self-hosted tooling ecosystem iterated on steadily for over a decade. The independent web pursues different goals than the attention economy, and the infrastructure it built to pursue those goals is worth understanding on its own terms.