manifesto

in the age of giant advertising conglomerates building dystopian surveillance machines, predatory social media services hijacking the very chemistry of the human brain in a cold, calculated effort to squeeze every last drop of engagement out of their users, and generative ai being used to infinitely churn out soulless, meaningless slop, the internet can feel like an infinite void of corporate mediocrity.

but it could be so much more. it was, once.

before the oligopolist tech giants and their insatiable hunger for growth at any cost subsumed the web into their walled gardens, the internet was a diverse ecosystem of people making stuff for the sheer joy of it, however they wanted, unbound by the myopic wishes of shareholders. although that era is long gone, there is still hope.

tiny islands glow amidst the void. islands that stand in defiance, in spite even, of the ceaseless tide of corpo sameness. islands built by individuals with intention, with a purpose beyond the cruel logic of algorithms.

if we want an internet worth exploring, we must guide more people to these islands, as well as encourage the creation of new ones. smallweb.cc hopes to be one such guide.

none of this is new, obviously. other projects like neocities and indieweb.org have been advocating for a more humane web for years, and one more website like them won't change things. but maybe, just maybe, it can help.

and if not, at least it was a fun excuse to learn ssr :)

our bots

we use custom crawlers to help speed up some of the more tedious parts of the moderation process. the bots never make decisions on their own; they help out with stuff like taking screenshots and extracting metadata.

we take extra care to ensure our bots don't disrupt the websites they visit and don't make any more requests than the average human visitor.

we use two different crawlers to speed up the moderation process: smallweb-screenshot and smallweb-discovery.

smallweb-screenshot is the main indexer. when a new website is added to smallweb, this bot takes a screenshot of the homepage and collects some basic metadata like the title and description.

smallweb-discovery is a tool that helps us find new websites to add to smallweb. it starts from a selected website and crawls through the links on that page, looking for other websites. it doesn't index the websites itself - just gives us a list of potential candidates.

you can identify the bots by their shared ip address: 137.220.62.252. since user agents can be easily faked, the ip address is the most reliable way to tell if a request is from us.

nothing on your website is shared or sold to third parties. your website, its code, writing, images, etc. will never be used for anything other than displaying it on smallweb.cc.

if your website is being excessively crawled by our bots, or if you have any other concerns about them, please let us know at bots [at] smallweb [dot] cc.

contact

if you have a question, comment, concern, and/or suggestion, feel free to reach out to me at haley [at] smallweb [dot] cc.

misc

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