My Smallweb Journey

Warning. This post is mostly my ramblings on how I re-discovered the internet and may contain traces of content.

The CorpoWeb

I’m not quite sure how I started down the road of discovery with the small web. It might have been a natural progression of self-hosting. Perhaps a tinge of nostalgia. Or maybe just gradually becoming fed up with the corporate internet after the Covid lock-down years. Whatever the single reason, or probably all of the above I found myself gradually falling down the rabbit hole of the small web, somewhat organically.

I’ve been self-hosting for about 15 years now. Originally it started with an old HP Proliant server running single virtual machines for each service I needed. It was a lot of VMs… At first it was for educational reasons. Teaching myself some VMware products in depth to better develop my career. That progressed into hosting applications for the home such as Plex, HomeAssistant, file shares and eventually Docker. The game changer for consolidating services. I lost interest for a while over Covid and found myself falling into some bad habits. Social media for the best part had passed me by. I had a Facebook account from years ago but didn’t use it much other than for arranging meetups with friends. LinkedIn I only used for job searching and amusing myself reading the corporate sycophancy posts and that was probably it. While having too much time on my hands, and failing to use it productively I unthinkingly signed up for a Twitter account. At first I was looking for a way to follow sites I was interested in and receive updates, as well as follow a few streamers for games I was playing at the time. Before I knew it I was being fed engagement bait, drama posts, geopolitics masquerading as a spectator sport and soul draining political ‘debates’. Fed up of staring into the abyss I deleted my socials and didn’t look back.

I’d begun to lament the poor use of my free time and dusted off the homelab, metaphorically and physically. I upgraded to a HP Gen11 MicroServer and a Synology DS920+ and begun playing with new services. I’d already been using RSS for years so spun up FreshRSS in a Docker container. This was more than adequate for following sites of interest. With my familiar services up and running again I started looking into other toys to play with.

Mastodon

I found my brief journey into social media utterly unfulfilling. It was soulless, contrived and corporate. Algorithms were feeding me content to keep me scrolling and were fundamentally wasting my time and mental energy. I wasn’t particularly sad to wrench myself away from that experience and didn’t particularly want to recapture it. For that reason I’m unsure how I got into Mastodon, given it was also a social platform. If I cast my memory back I suspect I might have read about the ActivityPub protocol on an article via RSS and became interested. No algorithms, could be self-hosted and it was  federated. Perfect. After about a week of research and a few false starts I deployed a Docker environment with Mastodon, PostgreSQL and Redis and at the time a MinIO S3 bucket (since moved to Garage).

Concepts I take for granted now weren’t immediately clear once my instance was up and running and I was staring at an empty feed, devoid of content. My little instance was very lonely… After a while I discovered relays and added a few. I now had a fire-hose of random content in my Federated timeline which was progress. My S3 storage filled up in about 24 hours, my instance crashed and despair reared it’s ugly head. Round two and some additional reading later I figured adding multiple huge relays to my instance wasn’t the best of ideas. I found the excellent FediBuzz service and only added hashtags of content that interested me, as well as a few instances I’d become familiar with over time. There were bots at first, oh there were bots… But after some liberal use of the suspend feature I’d cleared out almost 1000 accounts that were gradually filling up my timeline and storage. Some remained as they were genuinely interesting, also helping my little instance reach out to the wider Fediverse too.

I think the main thing I took for granted at first with the Fediverse was that I was actually talking to fellow human beings. Something I didn’t do once on the corporate nasties. Because I’d used Fedibuzz to ingest content I was interested in, I was seeing posts from others with similar interest. Retro gaming, self-hosting, miniature painting and amateur gardening, followed by a renewed interest in physical media were now at the forefront of my feeds. Bliss! No drama posts, infinite scroll or engagement bait, just genuine shared interests among a federated community of people.

I hadn’t actually intended for any of this to happen. I just read somewhere about the ActivityPub protocol and thought it was cool! Suddenly I’d then accidentally curated a set of timelines with interesting and relevant content. Was it a sprawling social network with millions of accounts? No. But maybe it didn’t need to be…

Matrix

Being ancient when this world was young I’d previously used IRC before. It was alright… I occasionally chatted in a few rooms with some nice people about niche interests. Anime, Linux stuff, the usual. I still keep a bouncer running on a VPS if I get the occasional urge to revisit a few rooms. Again, during Covid I’d dabbled with Discord. Most of it left me cold. Servers I visited were either full of random emote spam for when it came to gaming and anime interests. More technical servers just seemed to be an inadequate replacement for support forums. I didn’t stay long…

Being fully immersed in the Fediverse with the success of my foray into Mastodon I started hearing about Matrix. Again, the underlying technology sounded interesting and it was something I could also self-host from a few docker containers. I deployed a Synapse server in the homelab next and managed to configure an account against my domain. I joined a few rooms related to my interests and again, found like-minded individuals. I’m still not one for instant communication too much and prefer the slower speed of micro-blogging, but it was nice to have the option there using the same principals as Mastodon. I hadn’t quite replicated the same success of Mastodon but that was more a ‘me’ issue. My little server was out there and ready to use when I needed it.

Blogs

My RSS feeds were great. I could keep up-to-date using FreshRSS, with my feeds kept in sync across my PC and Phone. The problem was that I had a lot of sites, all broadly related to the same interests and many filled with direct and indirect advertising. Even despite Vivaldi browser’s venerable efforts pop-ups were gradually chipping away at my sanity and patience. I found at one point I had close to 1000 articles a day in my feed and scrolling through them was a mere race to the bottom. Perhaps one or two articles got a look in. A clear-up was needed.

At first I trimmed back sites which were broadly duplicating content for the best part. Did I really need to follow 10 tech sites all reporting on similar topics? Perhaps 20+ sites about gaming? No I did not. I’d cut most feeds down to one site per topic which was far more manageable. I’d kept Hacker News and found I was coming across more blog posts on there of interesting content. These were gradually filling my feed instead, as well as Mastodon users with similar interests I’d found which also had blogs too. Eventually I cam across Bubbles.town - an excellent aggregator of blogs containing all sorts of interests. Rather than having an RSS feed full of slick, corporate sites I mostly had individual blogs, aggregators, release notification pages and a couple of specific sites for interests.

Realising that Mastodon had a 500 character limit fairly early on, and not wanting to move away from the philosophy of micro-blogging too much, I figured I’d give this whole blogging thing a go too. WordPress came to mind first as I was familiar with it from my work. However I’d also come across the bare bones blogs others were hosting and quite liked the simplicity of it. I discovered many were using Hugo with the Bear theme so thought I’d give that a go. If you’ve made it this far you can see how that went. I had somewhere to dump my thoughts in long-form. In addition I could practice my writing style (with limited success) and perform some mental housekeeping, which as I type it sounds way more exciting than I intended. Incidentally I thought it would be nice not to have any user tracking either. No cookies or plugins monitoring usage stats, just static pages of my ramblings. Only standard web server logs aggregated into a few dashboards using GoAccess give me any vague idea that my blog is seeing traffic. Even if it’s probably mostly bots and scrapers.

The Smallweb

Through the combination of micro-blogging and Mastodon, long-form writing here and instant messaging on Matrix/IRC (which I plan to get into more in the future), I’d discovered an internet I didn’t know still existed. Sure, there was some nostalgia of the early internet days in the 90s, but this was different. Rather than the algorithm driven rage-bait and AI slop, there was still someplace where people were still posting and writing for passion, personal interest or just fun. Not for profit. If this is the small web, I think I like it here.

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