---
title: books and the small web
date: 2025-02-12T21:18:25.301Z
slug: 2025-02-12-books-and-the-small-web
author: Thomas Wilson

---
I think a lot of Normal People (TM) think that the internet *is* social media.  Recreationally, I don't think a lot of people move far from Meta's *Facebook* or *Instagram*, ByteDance's *TikTok*, Alphabet's *YouTube*, or X's… *X* (?).  

I don't think that's changing.  I think that most people will continue to use the internet like that.  People like me (and you, if you're reading one guy's self-rolled markdown blog) are getting tired and quietly leaving.  I've not checked Facebook since 2019, and in the last six months I've seriously limited my intake from Reddit or Instagram.

I quit for the reason I hear some people quit drinking: I just didn't *like* it.  I didn't like the way it made me feel, and I didn't like the way it made me see the world.  

I didn't like that the cost of "connection" was participating in an ecosystem that facilitates what I consider to be intolerable hate speech and unreality.  

I didn't like that companies hoarded huge wealth by establishing themselves in the early 2000s and pushed the foundations of the modern internet, attracted all the people (which is to say: suffocated all competition), and started selling those peoples' attention to advertisers.  This is "[Senator, we run ads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H8wx1aBiQ)"-level controversial and I think most people are mostly fine with it.  They were fine when newspapers,  billboards, and radio did it.  But now you can *only* run a newspaper or billboard or radio station if you can compete with the largest advertising companies in the world.  And I don't like that. 

The pressure's just kept going.  You notice it.  It's the five-minute ad breaks in podcasts.  It's the incremental increases in your streaming services, and the introduction of ads (non-exclusive changes.)  It's the increasingly less obvious "paid-for content" watermarks on videos (ads).  It's [click bait](https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-working-to-fix-threads-engagement-bait-problem-173135011.html) or rage bait or engagement bait.

Maybe it's because those companies invested [billions of dollars into virtual reality](https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/meta-spent-dollar43-billion-on-its-vr-division-in-three-months-last-year-and-made-checks-figures-dollar440-million-in-return/) that nobody wants.  Or maybe they spent billions building Large Language Models off the back of all the content they own (and a lot they don't), [and they want to tell you you need it](https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/work-life/the-microsoft-365-copilot-launch-was-a-total-disaster/) even though people don't seem to.

This has pushed me closer to two things: books and the small web.

You know what books are.  I dare say you've read one with your eyes or ears.  They're great.  They're sustained thoughts that I can read.  They're things I can buy to support (directly) people who want to sustain thoughts to that degree.  You know your nearest town or city probably has a building full of them and you can borrow basically any one of them for free, and it's staffed by people who would *love* to help you find a book you would enjoy.  

The small web isn't really a thing like books are a single thing.  It's ["people making stuff and sharing it"](https://andysblog.uk/the-small-web-is-great/).  Here [is a more useful introduction](https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/) with a bunch of links to follow.  If you want to discover the small web, try: 

- [Kagi's small web search](https://kagi.com/smallweb) - just keep hitting "refresh" and discover some weirdness.  Sort of like Digg or Stumble Upon back in the day.
- [Bear Blog's "Discover" page](https://bearblog.dev/discover/) - I don't know what this little Indie platform for small Blogs is doing to moderate its content and keep the web personal, but it feels well curated and approachable.
- [Indieblog.page](https://indieblog.page/) has a button that says "open random blog post" - go and click it and just discover people's voices.
