Appreciation for the small web | jola.dev

Home

About

Blog

Newsletter

Projects

Talks

I’ve increasingly been introducing the small web to my daily reading. The small web is a loosely defined concept, partly an attempt to refocus the internet on old school technology, on text websites with less or no JavaScript, and a mix of reactions against the increasing centralization and commercialization of the internet. Part of it is just regular people writing and creating communities for the joy of it, because they want to, rather than in the pursuit of profit, thought leadership, or followers.

You can find the small web in Bubbles, Kagi small web, and web rings or blog aggregators like https://ooh.directory/ or https://indieblog.page/. There’s Bear blog, which combines publishing and hosting of simple text blogs, and community.

These aggregators are great for discovering blogs, that you can then “subscribe” to using the small web technology of RSS/Atom feeds. It’s not hard to set up (although some companies beg to differ) and most blogs have feeds. I set up Miniflux on a VPS a while ago and I’ve been collecting blogs ever since. With ~80 blogs hooked up I get a decent amount of content on a daily basis.

The small web also has a lot of overlap with the communities popping up on the Atmosphere, using atproto to publish and share content on services like Leaflet and pckt. I previously wrote a bit about publishing posts from this blog to atproto. I think the protocol has tons of potential.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying exploring and stumbling upon varied and interesting topics, genuine voices, and I’m learning completely unexpected things. Like biking in Canada or bee baths. Sometimes it's just being introduced to cats (which is excellent). It’s a decentralized world of real people sharing and interacting, no big tech required. And a place that has a lot of opinions on whether or not to buy people coffee.

Go check out Bubbles or one of the blog aggregators, you might find something you really like! You can now also upvote this on Bubbles below, if you want.

Written by Johanna Larsson.<br>Thoughts on this post? Find me on Bluesky at

@jola.dev

Like this post?

Support my writing on GitHub Sponsors and get a monthly newsletter with content from the blog, or buy me a coffee on Ko-fi.

🙏 Sponsor me on GitHub

☕ Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi

Related posts

Treating LLMs as programming books

June 09, 2026

Thoughts on an approach for using LLMs effectively for coding without losing engagement and cognitive effort.

llm

agent

Publishing your blog to standard.site in Elixir

June 05, 2026

A walkthrough for posting your Elixir/Phoenix blog to Bluesky and the standard.site network, using a small mix task and an atproto client.

atproto

elixir

Generating OG images in Elixir

June 01, 2026

Generating OG images for your static pages and blog posts in Elixir

elixir

og