What happens when the mines run out?
The Captain announces a new golden age of prosperity. They just fill up again.
What, just like that?
Yeah. Well, you don’t think that’s wrong, do you?
Wrong? It’s an economic miracle. Of course it’s wrong.
Oh. Oh then, of course, the lights change.
What lights?
You know, the lights. The ones on the sky at night. Little points of light.
Do you mean the stars?

Conversation between the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Kimus (David Warwick) in The Pirate Planet (part 2) by Douglas Adams, broadcast 7th October 1978.

Anyone perusing my blog’s back-catalogue recently may recall my post about The Queen’s Reading Room, a post which I named “Reading the Room” in a very weak pun on the topic name. That post now has an update at the bottom clarifying that since I wrote it another podcast has started up which actually is called “Reading the Room”. Of course, it’s such an obvious title that, in this age of mass podcast proliferation, it was bound to be used eventually (and indeed the Substack blog carrying it needs to have “pod” at the end of its subdomain because plain “readingtheroom” was already taken), but this one seems to be rising to prominence among intellectual circles. It almost certainly gets a leg-up due to the fact that both the hosts – Felice Basbøll and Ella Dorn – are columnists for a handful of newspapers and magazines, as likely are a lot of their listeners, so its popularity is not entirely grassroots. Apart from the very broad stroke that they both talk about books, this podcast is entirely unlike the Clarence House production: There are no interviews with the authors, tours of vintage libraries or commissions of research into national literacy statistics. This podcast consists of the two hosts talking among themselves for over an hour at a time about one or more books they’ve read, their choices and the outflowing discussions focusing heavily on philosophy and contemporary socio-political matters. This is not an approach that it would be practical (or constitutionally wise) for Her Majesty to take.

Alright, that’s enough unpaid advertising. The podcast is not the real reason I’m writing this article now. In addition to their newspaper editorials, Basbøll and Dorn both also have individual Substack blogs. Most of what they write there isn’t relevant to this article either, but there was one that particularly struck me as important – Dorn’s post from 27^th February this year entitled “How to Take Down Big Tech”. The main thrust was that, for the preservation of online freedom and, more broadly, of enlightened society, it would be better if we avoided large social networks as a general principle in favour of smaller forums and individual websites. She referred to this as “The Small Web Movement”. I have supported the same goals for practically the whole of my online life and have often encountered posts, articles, comments and videos from other people concurring, but only here did I discover that it was an established ideology with a tangible identity.

My history with the World Wide Web is a fought one. For most of the noughties, my family – and most households in the area – had about the connection quality you would expect from rural broadband at that time. Then again, the web itself was still quite primitive. In 2009 out ISP jacked up the price prohibitively high. For the next few years we had no home broadband at all, and internet access was only achievable through a prepaid WiFi plug-in device, which had limited utility. I think it was in 2012 that, having established HubbNet, we finally got a decent connection again. No sooner had I rejoined the online world then I became aware that it was under threat. In the good old days it appeared that, subject only to the physical limitations of their hardware, anyone could have their own website, use any number of online services and upload any number of photographs or videos. It seemed to be, quite literally, a free-for-all. The story of the past decade or so has been the realisation that this utopia was unsustainable. For a long time all of these big sites were running at a loss, heavily subsidised by very wealthy investors who supported the development of these technologies in the hope that they would somehow become massively profitable in the near future. A lot of them still haven’t. As the money dried up and investors started insisting on a tangible return, and even moreso post-pandemic as the long era of ultra-low interest rates finally ended, companies had to make drastic changes to their products to increase revenue and slash costs. Restrictions were placed on space, ads became more aggressive and harder to skip. Pages disappeared behind paywalls and old pictures/videos/files were deleted. The crusade against free riders often became in practice a war on usability. The polite term, though not the common one, for this phenomenon is “Platform Decay”. If the freedom of the web wasn’t under threat from the companies themselves, it was threatened by politicians. Leaders and legislators across many countries, parties and decades have repeatedly sought to take control of the medium that most of them don’t understand in the slightest. This is alternately done in the name of copyright, security and safety. In the New Tens we were threatened with the spectres of SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA and Article 13. thankfully the most dangerous aspects of these were killed before they could reach the statute book. In the present decade we haven’t been so lucky: I am writing this in the wake of the coming-into-force of the Online Safety Act, a multipartisan disaster passed in 2023 against the objections of everyone with half a brain. Similar laws exist in some parts of the United States and are expected to proliferate across the European Union. However virtuous may have seemed the intentions these laws claimed, they all had the potential to destroy the internet as it has been known for the past thirty years. The deliberations over these laws tend to play out as battles between sovereign states and the major tech businesses, with the common end user having plenty of reason to distrust both. With states concentrating on the most prominent large platforms, and the platform owners themselves often pre-emptively shutting messages which could offend either the government or their advertisers, the need for a decentralised network of small independent backup sites becomes pressing.

The main benefit of having an entire website of your own is that it gives you a greater degree of personal control, especially with regard to visual customisation. Twitter and similar sites give you a profile picture, a couple of sentences’ written biography and maybe a header image if you’re lucky. Long ago YouTube channels allowed you to change the button colours and set a background image, but those abilities were removed around the time they were bought out by Google. Variables, on social media profiles, tend to be restricted within a fairly narrow range. Website builders, by contrast, often allow dozens, maybe hundreds of templates, after which the client has further options for menus, logos, assorted other widgets, fonts and colour schemes. If you’re coding your own website from scratch you can have it look and work basically any way you want. For a physical analogy, imagine a street where each resident can have his own house with its own unique design and decoration, versus a barrack hall where each inmate can, at best, have a different selection of photographs on the backboard behind his pillow. The flipside of this, of course, is that increased proximity allows conversations to happen faster. Short, snappy replies can be given almost in real time, whereas with separate websites they would naturally tend to be longer and more spaced out. Most in and indeed out of the Small Web Movement would consider that a positive, perhaps even the positive, but there are others for whom this spontaneity and intimacy are extremely valuable. There are ways to approximate this, if need be – most website builders include the options for comment sections on posts and pages, as well as a “re-blog” feature. If inter-platform compatibility is an issue, you could always just include a hyperlink to the other person’s post in your own. If that’s too cumbersome… maybe email each other? In my personal experience, I’ve more often witnessed this problem occur the other way around, as Tweeters desperately crush a substantial paragraph of text into a long string of single-sentence posts, or even screenshot the block of text on another medium then upload that as an image. The latter solution has the advantage of speed but it must be monstrously inefficient in terms of accessibility, searchability and digital memory space.

The Movement’s favoured solution is the return to the dedicated online forum. Forums have been around since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, but their power and prominence has waned in latter years with the rise of the social media giants. Reddit, in particular, is designed as a sort of universal mega-forum which subsumes all the others. Forums are a halfway point between personal websites and major social networks, giving people with shared interests a common space without having to invite the whole world in, allowing customisation of design at group level but not individual. Examples of forums which still command some cultural weight are The Student Room, Digital Spy and the notorious Mumsnet. One might throw in the Army Rumour Service as well. There are also lots of smaller forums dedicated to specific hobbies, needs or franchises. Often a long-running film, book, or television series will have a quasi-official fan forum, e.g. Star Trek has Trek BBS, Doctor Who has Outpost Gallifrey and I think I’ve already mentioned Sodor Island Forums. In case I’ve not mentioned already, there are, of course, heraldry forums too.

Fairly it could be said that all of this still falls short of the intention of the Small Web Movement because they still involve using someone else’s platform. The real goal is to have each blogger hosting their own website independently. While I accept the principle of decentralisation, I think expecting everyone to keep individual servers running may be a little beyond feasibility given constraints on money, space, electricity supply and technical knowledge. Indeed, since it has been over a decade since I completed my Information Technology GCSE or had much direct involvement in HubbNet, some of the material I’ve come across from the Movement about Gopher and Gemini is stretching the limits of my own understanding a little, though I hope to get there reasonably soon. Perhaps a compromise could come about in the form of small local data centres, with hosting space rented out in a manner akin to garden allotments. More realistically, since the intention is to transition the masses away from social media accounts, builders such as this would be a relatively easy first step, from which those most determined (and whose sites are successful enough to justify it) can later move the whole way.

I remain undecided on the necessity of registering your own domain rather than using a subdomain of the website builder. I have written before about my disappointment in having to go for “HomeworkDirect.UK” because the Uncle Ben’s rice brand snapped up “HomeworkDirect.Com” just before I could claim it. I always intended this blog to be at “RobinStanleyTaylor.Net”, but did not actually get around to registering the domain until 2017, with “RobinStanleyTaylor.Wordpress.Com” sufficing for the first two years. I cannot run a proper counterfactual to see how the blog would have fared without the change, but I know I was getting at least some regular engagement on the small number of posts I’d made up until that point. I suppose the main value of a domain is on an aesthetic level – it confers an air of formality and professionalism, whereas a “.someonelse.com” looks casual and amateur. A personalised domain also tends to be shorter (what with one of the levels being removed) which makes branding easier. On a practical level, and in keeping with the general thrust of this article, having your own domain allows you to totally replace the website you use without having to give up the URL you’ve already posted everywhere. I took advantage of this in 2022 when I moved Homework Direct to WordPress because Wix put its prices up. On the other hand, renting a domain is itself an expense as well as requiring identification whereas subdomain sites can still be free and anonymous. Of the sites I frequent (on which topic more later), I notice that The Norton View is still on a WordPress subdomain after operating more than fifteen years, as did Murrey and Blue under its original ownership. Of the many Substack blogs I’ve recently encountered, the vast majority have kept it at “.substack.com”, whereas it would be difficult to imagine them all doing the same on WordPress. Perhaps one is considered more prestigious than the other in some way.

As a case study into the importance of having a website and not just a channel, I point to the example of Chuck Sonnenburg, professionally known as SF-Debris. Chuck is a film and television critic of more than seventeen years’ standing, making him one of the seniormost figures in what is now a very large “reviewtainment” industry. He got his start talking about Star Trek: Voyager, then gradually branched out to the rest of the Star Trek franchise, then to other science fiction and fantasy franchises (e.g. Doctor Who and Red Dwarf) as well as whatever miscellaneous films and series his fans suggest for him. He claims to have surpassed the ten thousand video mark some years ago. His journey has rarely been easy. His review videos take the form typical of the genre – ten to fifteen minutes of footage from the episode he’s reviewing, occasionally playing the sound but mostly as a silent montage over which he reads his commentary. Purveyors of this type of content maintain that it falls under Fair Use, but that doesn’t stop IP owners – or indeed the automated systems of the video-hosting services) from blocking videos on the grounds of copyright infringement. Chuck has been around long enough to witness several such piracy purges. For his first few years he used YouTube as his primary platform – only natural as it was and is by far the largest – with a backup channel on Blip.TV. The backup channel was mainly used for long-form videos, as YouTube back then had quite restrictive limits on running time. In 2011, having had a few too many threats from YouTube, Chuck decided to take down hundreds of his own videos before the platform inevitable purged them, then set about making Blip his main platform instead. Rather than simply reupload his old videos in their original form, Chuck decided that a lot of them needed rerecording. He did this alongside still making new reviews, so it took years before all his missing episodes were available again. Almost immediately this effort was rendered worthless because BlipTV completely shut down as a platform. Chuck therefore had to reupload everything again with yet another host. He has joked about this himself, claiming not to remember how many platforms have dropped him over the years. At the time of writing he seems to be using DailyMotion for his “full motion” videos while, ironically, going back to YouTube for lesser versions where he essentially talks over a slideshow of still images instead of moving clips. This alternative format is less engaging to watch but safer from a copyright perspective, as well as almost certainly being easier to edit. Here the point of this [my, not Dorn’s] article comes into play – originally Chuck’s videos were displayed on his YouTube channel and that was likely to be the place where people watched and commented on them. Alongside this, however, he also had a standalone website at sfdebris.com which essentially ran like a blog with each post being titled after the episode or film he was reviewing and consisting of an embed of the corresponding video followed by a short (and snarky) written description. Originally this could have struck some as pointless, but the repeated purges vindicated his approach, for links to his website remain usable long after links to his video channels are killed. When the videos are taken down, the sites pages are left with error messages or even just empty spaces where the embeds used to be, but the page titles, the descriptions and the navigation menus are intact so that the site exists as something of an empty shell. As Chuck proceeds with reuploading on a new video host, the shell is gradually filled in again with the new videos being embedded exactly where the old ones had been. When the reupload process is eventually completed, visitors will find the site looking and working much as it did before. If they notice any difference at all, it will only be that the play button on the video is a different colour – just like the citizens of Zanak noticing the new lights in the sky when the mines are refilled. Nowadays Chuck has the DailyMotion videos unlisted to they cannot be viewed from the hosting site itself, only as embedded on his blog, so that none come to think of the former as his home. Chuck also has a dedicated forum set up to take on the role normally played by the comment section. Again, this helps to maintain long-term continuity, because comments left on the videos themselves would be lost to digital history upon blocks or takedowns. It also has the advantage that the conversations themselves are easier to write and read.

If you’re as much a pessimist as I am you’ve probably already anticipated that if a critical mass of content creators adopted this strategy then the platform owners would cotton on and start forbidding embeds, or at least restricting them in some (probably financial) way to force viewers to use the host sites directly. In this scenario I would hope that creators already using said strategy would be able to vote with their feet by switching to hosts more obliging (unless of course they were to all do it at once). In the interim a simple direct link on the blog page would probably suffice for the same purpose, even if it was less elegant in looks.

Dorn’s article expressed a wish to see people exchanging URLs for websites instead of handles for profiles, so at this point I ought to share some of my own recommendations. Per her advice, I have created a link directory on this website, which can be accessed under the “About” heading in the main menu.

FURTHER READING

• The small web is beautiful (Ben Hoyt, March 2021)
• Poor Man’s Web (Serge Zaitsev, 27th April 2021)
• A Look At The Small Web (Jenny List for Hackaday, 10th September 2024)