(2020-08-07) Balkan What Is The Small Web

Aral Balkan: What is the Small Web? To understand what the Small Web is, let’s compare it to the Big Web. In other words, to the centralised Web we have today. The Big Web is the centralised web; it is a web in the sense of a spider’s web. The spiders that sit at its centre waiting to suck you dry are Big Tech people farmers like Facebook, Google, etc.

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

The Small Web, quite simply, is the polar opposite of the Big Web. It applies the Small Technology principles to the web.

The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments

Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. (personal server)

Another fundamental difference between the Big Web and Small Web is that on the Big Web we trust servers and distrust clients whereas on the Small Web, we distrust servers and trust clients. We treat servers as dumb delivery mechanisms

Our greatest usability challenge on the Small Web is making the ownership and control of your own web site or application as seamless as possible. It must be done in a manner that does not require any technical know-how whatsoever.

*The first step to building the Small Web is to build tools for developers to empower them to build the Small Web.

That’s why we’re building Kitten at Small Technology Foundation.*

Single tenancy affords us a great reduction in complexity that we must take full advantage of if we are to make the Small Web experience as good as (if not better) than the Big Web experience.

It does not scale vertically like the Big Web. It scales horizontally

The single tenant web is sustainable and scales differently. It does not have economies of scale. It does not scale vertically like the Big Web. It scales horizontally. (situated software)

You hear a lot of talk about blockchains and proof of work but this is not what the Small Web is about. Having a billion copies of the same database is not decentralisation. That’s centralisation. If you have a billion people, having a billion – two billion, three billion… – unique databases is decentralisation.

update: Now that Kitten is reaching a level of maturity, we are using it to build a tool called Domain for hosting Small Web sites and applications built with Kitten with the aim of making it as easy to have your own Small Web site at your own domain3 as it is to sign up for a centralised social media platform. We will be hosting our own instance of Domain at http://small-web.org. The domain has already been included in the Public Suffix List.