I've only just discovered the #fediverse and found out #indieweb and #smallweb are what you call those cool, fun, real websites I've missed so badly.
I feel like I've just opened a door that I've only ever heard muffled crys of joy from the other side. It's completely bonkers in here. So much creativity. Am I late to the party or is it just getting started?
I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.
We should be looking at what tech works when you don't have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale without paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.
There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.
I’ve been looking for an ngrok alternative for a while now that’s (a) affordable (b) easy to use and (c) works with Kitten¹. Today, after testing a bunch of them again and getting fed up, I found LocalXpose that checks all the boxes.
I signed Small Technology Foundation up as an affiliate so if you use this link to check it out, we’ll get 40% of your $6/mo pro account fee should you subscribe:
Exploring the benefits of blogging with and using a pseudonym online, how it still enables me to build meaningful relationships world wide with others who share similar interests.
Social bookmarking is a novel use case for #ActivityPub and I’m super excited about it. I heckin’ love links and lists! I wanna use them for everything.
Things like #Bookwyrm are cool, but it’s not what I want. I just wanna link the thing. Books, films, podcasts, articles, songs.., they’re all just resource recommendations which can be encapsulated by links.
Thanks to @raffomania and @eb for the indirect prompts leading to this article mixing their ideas with my own.
> Your blog doesn't have to be as monotonous as a daily diary recounting your activities. It can be simple, silly, stupid. It can be YOU. Or anything you want it to be. Someone will find it interesting, someone will read it.
Blogs and personal websites are cool. You are interesting, someone wants to read what you have to share!
that you don't even have to sign in/sign up for! You can even read my innovative, revolutionary, disruptive, #RSS feed for free! https://robertkingett.com/
> A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.
Creating simple websites does not have to be complicated…
Coming soon: it’s going to be trivial to deploy a different app on your Small Web server. Useful if you’re a dev and you’re playing around with different apps.
(Also, notice the speed at which deployment happens. I’m one step away from implementing this in Domain using pre-warmed Kitten instances – called toasty kittens – thereby bringing the time it takes to deploy your own Small Web place down to a handful of seconds.)
… and why I’ve had to build so much infrastructure in the past few years. It wasn’t just to reinvent the wheel but to have control over every aspect of the experience.
Well, it’s getting closer to being a reality and I’m really excited to hopefully finally be able to share what will be the culmination of the last decade of my work with more of you starting this year.
Interesting story: did you know the Web wasn’t initially understood or embraced at CERN? It was seen as a distraction.
Here’s Robert’s video of Ben Segal – lovely human being and Tim’s mentor – showing us around CERN ~15 years ago and telling the story (see if you can spot a much younger me in shot):
When I speak about spending the last few years “building infrastructure”, you might be wondering what sorts of things I’m talking about.
Here are some examples:
JSDB: an in-memory, in-process database that writes to a JavaScript append-only transaction log and which you can use as if you were interacting with regular JavaScript objects.
Similarly, Auto Encrypt Localhost does the same thing – in pure JavaScript, without using mkcert, etc. – for keeping your dev and production environments identical:
And while Kitten is new, it uses those elements and more as well as all the lessons learned building Site.js (https://sitejs.org) – going back five years.
All-in-all I’ve been working towards creating the Small Web—and Kitten, Domain, and Place—for half a decade and, on the greater problem of trying to formulate alternatives to Big Tech for the last decade. All without any funding from the commons/EU.