I tend to think these articles which have become common come from a good place but say more about someone's internet habits than about the internet. I find most social media have a profile section for "personal website". I find many such personal websites by following people's github profiles from interesting repositories or PRs. Sometimes they link to other websites. I do the same in HN, snoop around to see if an interesting comment has a link to a website in the profile. Many articles are posted on HN from personal websites, which again usually link to other websites. I don't know I feel like, if I wanted I could spend all day doing this and would have no problem finding more than hours in the day. So are we complaining about the internet or that we got stuck in the walled gardens of youtube and tik tok and so on and kind of wish we would spend more time on the "old school internet" but don't because the other part is so addictive?
Just like you said - being surrounded by interesting people on interesting platforms who are likely to create small websites, we occasionally stumble across a link in a walled garden profile.
For the average internet user, small websites don't exist. Very few Instagram and TikTok profiles feature links to handcrafted sites. Google increasingly funnels all queries to the same 500 giant SEO'd sites.
I guess the question is whether that matters. The average internet user today looks a lot different from the average internet user 20 or 30 years ago. The internet looked different but the demographics looked different as well. The average internet user primarily uses Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok because that is the internet they enjoy.
I have a tiny website. It’s a static site where I occasionally post things. I don’t have any trackers or ads.
Behemoths didn’t kill the open web. They created walled gardens which were more attractive to the 99% of people who aren’t interested in doing their own dev ops. Most people prefer to spend their time with their hobby rather than figure out how to set up a server or create ssh keys for GitHub pages.
In my point of view what's lacking is more places where curators that have found interesting small sites can showcase them.
I used Digg a lot for that, StumbleUpon was also really nice for this type of discovery, then early Reddit had a similar effect.
Nowadays? I don't know where to go, I can do all this effort of clicking around to find them but honestly I don't have the time, I'm in my mid-30s, I won't be jumping around hyperlinks searching for breadcrumbs of potential good content... A lot of people are doing that work already, like you, we are lacking a good place where we can pool this curation work collectively so others can discover it.
I have more Matrix and Discord rooms/"servers" than I can read in a day. If I catch up to the chatter in my Matrix anime rooms and my Discord RPG servers I'm not going to get any work done, any work done on the RPG I'm running, or any chores done at home. This is nothing to say about the personal blogs I read, the substacks, and Reddit, HN, etc. People are starving for personal content? As you say, I think this is more a user problem.
"Small web" advocates may eschew the ethics of larger platforms, but they appear to desire the same positive feedback loops that make the larger platforms addicting.
I think that a problem for some people is that the straightforward solutions to discoverability, such as simply browsing the web in the manner you described or even what is given in the marginalia.nu article, do not solve the desire to be seen as urgently as more technologically coordinated processes.
