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What is the Small Web? Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! 23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. To understand what the Small Web is, let’s compare it to the Big Web. In other words, to the centralised Web we have today. You are allowed to rent space on Megacorp’s servers in exchange for giving up your privacy, freedom of speech, and other human rights. The Big Web is the centralised web; it is a web in the sense of a spider’s web. The Big Web has “users” - a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit. We farm users in server farms. On the Big Web, we can fit thousands of users into a single server and Megacorps “scale” to run thousands upon thousands of servers in their farms. On the Big Web, you never own your own home.
You must rent your home from Megacorps. Most often, you don’t have to pay for your home using money. You pay for it by forfeiting your privacy, freedom of speech, and your other human rights. The mass surveillance and factory farming of human beings on a global scale is the business model of people farmers like Facebook and Google. It is the primary driver of the socioeconomic system we call surveillance capitalism. On the Small Web, you own your own home. The Small Web, quite simply, is the polar opposite of the Big Web. It applies the Small Technology principles to the web. The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2). On the Small Web, you (and only you) own and control your own home (or homes). Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you.
On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of “users”. When we refer to people, we call them people. Another fundamental difference between the Big Web and Small Web is that on the Big Web we trust servers and distrust clients whereas on the Small Web, we distrust servers and trust clients. We treat servers as dumb delivery mechanisms. The client - under the control of the person who owns the site or app - is the only trusted environment. Our greatest usability challenge on the Small Web is making the ownership and control of your own web site or application as seamless as possible. It must be done in a manner that does not require any technical know-how whatsoever. Our goal is to make owning and maintaining your own home on the web as easy as renting from a Megacorp without all of the toxic ramifications the latter entails. We are not there yet but the end (beginning?) is in sight.
Kitten is a complete Small Web development kit (including server). The first step to building the Small Web is to build tools for developers to empower them to build the Small Web. That’s why we’re building Kitten at Small Technology Foundation. Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web. They are optimised for creating Big Tech and the Big Web. While we can repurpose some of them for our own uses, we also need tools specifically optimised for building single-tenant web applications and the Small Web. We’re currently building the tools developers (including us) need to build the everyday tools everyone will use. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In other words, Big Tech’s tools will never dismantle Big Tech’s house. The single tenant web is sustainable and scales differently. It does not have economies of scale. It does not scale vertically like the Big Web.
It scales horizontally. As the Small Web scales, no single organisation or person scales alongside it. It does not centralise wealth and power. The Small Web is not a place; it is a public sphere. It’s the interconnections of individually-owned and controlled sovereign spaces on a global digital network. Now that Kitten is reaching a level of maturity, we are using it to build a tool called Domain for hosting Small Web sites and applications built with Kitten with the aim of making it as easy to have your own Small Web site at your own domain3 as it is to sign up for a centralised social media platform. The domain has already been included in the Public Suffix List. This work has begun and is in the early stages. This service, once ready, will still initially be aimed at developers. However, with the infrastucture for instantly deploying any Small Web app or web site created, we (and other developers) can then turn our attention to creating beautiful, useful, and perhaps even delightful everyday things for everyday people on the Small Web that adhere to Small Tech principles.
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