this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Nah. I grew up in the small Web. That's how Google got powerful, by having a better index than anybody else, and exposing their cache so that even if something that ranked highly went down, you could still access it. The small Web doesn't work at any scale, because that's not how people work. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook started smallish. One remains and it's huge. Do you remember Foursquare? How they competed with Yelp, Facebook, and Google, until all three just did their smallish product, but better?
Personal home pages are sweet and nostalgic. But they need to be indexed somewhere or they're only as big as the network of people who the page creator can give their card to.
We need to embrace the big Web and start steering it. Running away won't help, and it doesn't solve the problems that the big sites solved.
You're operating from a base assumption that others may not share: that you need your community to be bigger than the people you can hand your business card to.
Come to think of it, that's probably true. Then again, I don't like handing out business cards. I respect that opinion, but I like larger communities.
There used to be things called webrings. If lots of self-hosted independent sites are to become a thing again, it might be worth resurrecting and improving that sort of technology.
You can see hints of Fediverse-like thinking in them even though it's (low)tech from long before.
I remember webrings (there still are a few alive and growing in niche communities, btw). They stopped being significant because they were inefficient in UX for browsing and content-curation, which search engines and indices did very well.