As I write this, the new President of the United States is trying to replace the democratic republic form of government with a fascist one. It appears that he's succeeding. Despite the focus on the United States right now though, this trend of far-right groups taking power is not limited to this country. Several countries in Europe, like Italy and Spain, are seeing a resurgence of conservative ideology. The regime change in the USA has been accompanied by an overt shift of Big Tech - that is, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and others - towards fascist policy. This makes the centralized version of the Web that most people are familiar with a hostile place.
There are refuges from this, though. The "small web" - personal websites run independently from the big platforms - is one component of that. The website you're reading this on is an example of the content you can find on the small web. It's built and run by me. Many such sites exist. The trick is in finding them. Following links from other small web sites is one way. Directories exist too. There are even search engines dedicated specifically to indexing the small web. I will put links to some of these at the end of this post.
At the time of writing, this website is hosted on Netlify, which is a platform for static websites. To better safeguard the site, I will move it in the near future to a server I control.
If you don't have the technical knowledge to build and host a website, then you can try using a site like Neocities. It hosts the website for you, much like the old Geocities.
Beyond social media, though, there is still much of the mainstream Internet that we use in our day-to-day life. There are messaging applications like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, video sites like YouTube, event websites like Meetup, and so on. To replace things like this, we are best served by using federated and decentralized alternatives. For those unfamiliar with the concept, "federation" refers here to multiple different instances of a particular service being run independently of each other but sharing content with each other. In that sense, it's kind of like email; no matter who runs your email service, you can send email to any other email service.
Messenger can be replaced with Matrix. YouTube can be replaced with PeerTube. Meetup can be replaced with Mobilizon. There is a more complete list at the end of this post.
I run a Matrix homeserver for family and friends. It's encrypted end-to-end, so governments and bad actors can't (easily) gain access to it or its data. I also use Signal, but as that is centrally controlled by an American company, I trust it less.
This site and Iron Arachne will be moving to servers I control in the near future, too.
I already run a server at home for videos and music, but that is inaccessible outside a select few devices. I use Tailscale to control access to that.
Other Blog Posts
Resources
- Awesome Self-Hosted: a list of self-hosted alternatives
- Fedi Tips: more information about what the "Fediverse" and federated services are
- Gemini: about the Gemini protocol, an alternative to the Web
Services
- Jitsi Meet: video calls
- Mastodon: social media
- Matrix: chat
- Mobilizon: event management
- Neocities: platform for do-it-yourself websites
- PeerTube: video sharing
- Pixelfed: image sharing
- Tailscale: zero-trust networking
Discovery Tools
- Marginalia: a search engine that prioritizes non-commercial content
- Wiby: a search engine specifically targeting the small web