Open a browser tab and navigate to any major website. You'll see the same thing: cookie consent banners, newsletter pop-ups, autoplaying videos, engagement-optimized headlines, and content that exists to serve ads rather than readers. The commercial web in its current form is actively hostile to the people using it.
But there's another web — one that's been growing quietly while the commercial web eats itself. Personal blogs written by one person about things they genuinely care about. Technical write-ups that go deep on obscure topics because the author found it interesting, not because a keyword research tool said it would rank. Tiny tools built to solve a specific problem. Hand-coded HTML pages that load in 200 milliseconds and contain nothing but the content you came for.
This is the small web, and it's the best part of the internet.
What the Small Web Actually Is
The small web isn't a technology or a protocol. It's a loose category: websites made by individuals or small groups, without a business model driving content decisions. A developer's blog about compiler internals. A hobbyist's page about vintage synthesizers. A researcher's notes on their field. A personal site with links to things the author finds interesting.
What these sites share isn't a tech stack — they range from hand-written HTML to static site generators to WordPress. What they share is intent. They exist because someone had something to say or share, not because someone had something to sell. The content serves the reader, not an engagement algorithm or an ad network.
This distinction matters more than it sounds. When your content exists to serve engagement metrics, you optimize for clicks, time-on-page, and return visits. You write listicles. You use engagement bait headlines. You pad articles to hit word count targets. When your content exists because you wanted to explain something, you write until the explanation is done and then you stop.
The Discovery Problem
The small web has a visibility problem. Google's ranking algorithm heavily favors established domains with high backlink counts and regular publishing cadences — exactly the properties that commercial content farms have and individual bloggers don't. A comprehensive, technically accurate blog post by a domain expert will be outranked by a thin, SEO-optimized article from a content farm with a higher domain authority.
Social media used to solve this — you'd follow interesting people on Twitter and they'd share interesting articles. That distribution channel has fragmented. Twitter's algorithm shows you 'engagement' rather than the people you follow. Reddit's front page is dominated by large subreddits. Hacker News is one of the few remaining venues where a personal blog post can reach a wide audience, but it's a single community with a specific perspective.
This is where projects like Kagi's Small Web initiative become interesting. Kagi, the paid search engine, maintains a curated index of small, independent websites and gives them a ranking boost in search results. The idea is simple: when someone searches for a technical topic, surface the thoughtful blog post alongside the commercial results. Let the user choose.
Why Developers Should Care
If you write code for a living, the small web is disproportionately valuable to you. The best technical content on the internet lives on personal blogs, not on commercial platforms.
Think about the technical resources you've actually learned from. Julia Evans's zines and blog posts about systems programming. Dan Abramov's deep dives on React internals. Hillel Wayne's writing on formal methods. Jessie Frazelle's posts on container security. These are all personal sites. The authors write because they understand something deeply and want to share that understanding, not because they're hitting a publishing schedule for SEO.
Commercial tech content optimizes for breadth — covering every framework, every tool, every keyword — because breadth drives traffic. Individual writers optimize for depth, because they're writing about what they actually know. One developer's detailed post about debugging a specific Postgres query planner issue is worth more than ten '10 Postgres Tips You Need to Know' listicles.
How to Find the Small Web
The discovery problem is real, but there are tools and techniques that work.
- RSS is alive. Most personal blogs have RSS feeds. Use a feed reader (NetNewsWire, Miniflux, Feedbin) and subscribe to blogs you find interesting. This is the single most effective way to follow the small web — you get every post, chronologically, with no algorithm deciding what you see.
- Blogrolls and link pages. Many small web sites have a 'links' or 'blogroll' page listing other sites the author reads. Following these links is like browsing a curated library. One good blogroll can introduce you to a dozen new writers.
- Hacker News and Lobsters. Both communities surface personal blog posts regularly. Lobsters in particular, with its invite-only model and tagging system, is excellent for finding technical writing.
- Kagi and Marginalia. Kagi's Small Web index and Marginalia Search (an independent search engine that specifically indexes small websites) are purpose-built for finding non-commercial content.
- Web rings and directories. Yes, these still exist. The IndieWeb community maintains directories of personal websites. They feel retro, and they work.
Building Your Own Corner
The best way to participate in the small web is to have your own site. Not a Medium account, not a Substack newsletter, not a Twitter thread — a website you control, on a domain you own, with content that'll still be accessible in ten years.
The technical barrier is near zero. A static site generator, a cheap domain, and a free hosting tier (GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify) gets you a fast, reliable website for under $15 per year. You don't need a CMS, a database, or a JavaScript framework. HTML and CSS are enough. In fact, the constraint of simplicity often produces better sites — fast-loading, accessible, focused on content.
<!-- A perfectly functional personal website -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Your Name</title>
<style>
body {
max-width: 650px;
margin: 2rem auto;
padding: 0 1rem;
font-family: system-ui, sans-serif;
line-height: 1.6;
color: #333;
}
a { color: #0066cc; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Your Name</h1>
<p>Developer. Writes about things.</p>
<h2>Posts</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="/post-one/">That time I debugged a race condition for three days</a></li>
<li><a href="/post-two/">Why I switched from React to vanilla JS</a></li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
<!-- Loads in under 50ms. Accessible. Readable.
No cookies, no tracking, no JavaScript needed.
This is a complete website. -->What matters isn't the technology — it's the act of publishing to a space you control. Your Twitter posts live on Twitter's servers, subject to Twitter's decisions about visibility, moderation, and continued existence. Your blog posts on your domain live as long as you pay for the domain. That's a meaningful difference for content you care about. And it contributes to the broader project of preserving knowledge on the web.
What to Write About
The most common objection to starting a blog is 'I don't have anything original to say.' This is almost always wrong, and even when it's right, it doesn't matter.
Write about what you learned today. Not a tutorial — just what you learned and why it was surprising or confusing. Write about a bug you fixed and how you found it. Write about a tool you built, even if it's tiny. Write about your opinions on technology decisions you've made. These posts are valuable precisely because they're specific, personal, and grounded in real experience.
You don't need to write comprehensive guides or definitive references. The commercial web has those covered (badly, but covered). What the small web does uniquely well is first-person, experience-based writing. 'I tried X, here's what happened' is a format that's almost impossible to fake and almost always useful to someone.
The Economics of Attention
The commercial web exists because attention is monetizable. Every website competing for your clicks is trying to convert your attention into ad revenue, subscription fees, or product sales. This creates a race to the bottom: louder headlines, more intrusive ads, more manipulative design patterns.
The small web opts out of this economy entirely. When there's no financial incentive to capture attention, there's no incentive to manipulate. The content can be exactly as long as it needs to be. The design can prioritize readability over engagement. The site can respect the user's time because there's no business model that depends on wasting it.
This isn't sustainable for everyone — people need to earn a living, and ad-supported content isn't inherently evil. But the existence of a parallel web that operates on different incentives keeps the overall ecosystem healthier. It proves that the dark patterns aren't necessary, that websites can be fast and respectful and useful, that the commercial web's hostility toward users is a choice, not an inevitability.
Keep It Weird
The best small web sites don't look like commercial sites. They have personality. Unusual color schemes, hand-drawn illustrations, unconventional layouts, pages that exist just because the author thought they were fun. This isn't unprofessionalism — it's the natural result of individuals building things for themselves rather than for conversion metrics.
The web was supposed to be this. Before platforms consolidated everything into identical-looking feeds, the web was a collection of individual spaces, each reflecting the person who built it. The small web is a return to that original promise — a network of human-scale sites, made by people, for people. The technology to build and host them has never been easier or cheaper. The only thing missing is deciding to do it.