Leaflet Preface

This is another one of those Living Documents from the File Cabinet of my Website. You guys are actually getting version 1.1.2 of this one, but the latest one can always be found on my site, as always.

Intro

What if your teacher was also a student? These are things I'm actively learning on the Small-Web, having been a very Social-Media-Pained, but also Social-Media-Pilled individual.

This will not be another "How to Make a Website" Tutorial because there are already enough of those.

After I tidy up the code that spits out my site, I plan to release and maintain an 11ty starter for people who want to build something like it. (After I'm financially secure.)

But until then, have my Small-Web Survival Guide, which focuses on the mental-adjustment side of things.

One more thing, which I'd like to briefly mention despite the fact that it's going to become its own manifesto: your website need not look like a 90s Webmaster's Dream or a sleek, shiny, oiled 2020+ Web App to be good, or useful. It can even look like a long text document with images and links. It's OKAY to just BE on here.

Anyway, the ever-evolving guide…

Lessons

1. The Small-Web is Slow as Molasses

Unlike the Social-Web, you WILL make a forum post, sign a Guestbook, post in a Comment Box, send an email, make a site/page with visible contact info, and not hear back for hours, days, weeks, or even months. You will hate this, and it will drive you insane. But get this: it's actually a good thing…

This is because the Small-Web moves at a slower pace. Those accustomed to the life freedom the Small-Web brings are used to the rhythm of going off into the real world, working on their projects or interests, and returning to update their site when there're things to share. This can be after weeks, months, or even years.

The best way to cope is to live life and make art. Don't refresh pages, eternally waiting for something new. Your homepage, others' homepages, and Small-Web communities are the ones waiting for you to go out and live so that you can return to them with cool things to share.

The Small-Web's slowness is probably the most major adjustment any Social-Web dropout, or even Social-Web users, will face. The update/response speed is slow, but it comes with two benefits.

No user, or algorithm, is expecting multi-daily, daily, or weekly updates from you. This means you can take your time indulging in hobbies, creating, seeing friends IRL, or living life—all without your audience wondering if you died, all because you haven't made three banger posts this week.

The UX of Social Media feeds and a large following (key: not follower, following) count inspires fleeting, "gotta scroll as much of my main feed as I can before the bus arrives" Micro-Attention. In contrast, the UX of Personal Sites encourages people to thoroughly catch up on, or get to know, one Netizen at a time.

In short, on the Small-Web, you're more likely to have someone's full attention and interest. Social-Web users are forced to juggle their attention among multiple potential recipients and context-switch at a rapid pace.

The more you share both from, and about yourself on your Small-Web home, the fuller your audience's understanding of you can become. On the Social-Web, we are given mere fragments of other people's thoughts, reactions, and creative output, in popcorn order.

Even in reverse-chronological mode, you are given a thought from person A, before you scroll down to be met with a piece of art from person B, then a reaction to a current happening from person C. After scrolling, you feel like you haven't learned all too much more about any of these three people. It takes months, if not years, of following someone only on the timeline to get a sense of who they are. That's still nice, but it requires more time, and life that could have been spent doing something else.

Interactions on the Small-Web, though still more parasocial than IRL or more intimate ONL interactions, allow you to get a way better understanding of someone by visiting their well-loved personal site. You can have your audience understand you better, too! A website isn't built in a day, but the more of your (privacy-safe and stranger-appropriate) self-expression you add to it, the better your digital connections can become.

2. You Have to Make the First Move

IDK what it is about the Social-Web, and I'd even include its earlier, lesser-Algorithmic experiments like deviantArt in the mix, but something about sites where netizens congregate and post communally causes a certain behavior that intensifies the more algorithmic the site is.

This behavior is like: "I'm going to pour effort into making myself/my website/my art/my media/my posts, as Cool, Skillful, Unique, Inspiring, Intriguing, and Masterful as possible, so that passersby will be so amazed, that they contact ME first."

I think we do this because somewhere along the line, the concept of reaching out to other individuals—making yourself and your interest in them and their work known to them—became like… cringe? Rude? A social faux-pas of some sort?

IDK how that happened, but it's not true. Both on the Social-Web and on the Small-Web, people love to receive greetings, feedback, and other positive messages from others. On the Small-Web, such positive messages are a pleasant surprise. On the Social-Web, engagement is craved. So I'm baffled by the learned behavior of like… avoiding reaching out first at all costs. I'm even baffled by its presence in myself.

Most, if not all, forms of connection on here, like making friends or joining WebRings, either require you to reach out/make yourself known first, or are greatly improved by doing so. Don't be a chicken. Like I still am.

In any case, here are some tips to get you started.

Email is a great way to communicate on the Small-Web. The UX and culture surrounding it inspire messages that can have more depth and conversation per message, with no need to participate in instant-reply ping-pong with the other party.

Much like a separate P.O. box that isn't your home address, it's a good idea to have a social email address for messaging that isn't tied to your logins on most, or any, of your accounts. But it's not necessary.

A lot of people use Gmail or ProtonMail, so maybe use one of those. If you have paid web hosting, there's a good chance it comes with free email hosting that you can connect to email apps on your PC, tablet-computer, or phone.

Even on the Small-Web, there can be some avoidance of friction. Do as I say, not as I do, since my contacts are currently tucked away in a Nav Menu I figure people aren't clicking on, but…

…put your Guestbook, Comment Box, Email mailTo Link, or whatever else have you, where people can see it… Don't be like me… …haha!

3. But how do I Follow People?!

Oh, how the Social-Web makes us incompetent…

BOO! RSS JUMPSCARE!! I don't blame you, UX and culture shape a lot of who we are and how we expect things to work, but it's time to learn about RSS feeds. RSS is basically a Notifications Language that anyone can write in. All your latest push Notifications are written into one (or multiple) web links that other people can copy in order to get Notifications with.

Instead of hoping some kind and benevolent tech CEO consolidates all your Notifications into one app, you go out and find other Netizens, you copy their RSS link, and you put it into your RSS Reader app. This app will be the hub for all of your Small-Web (and often, webcomic and podcast too! Rad!) Notifications.

Popular RSS readers of choice are Feedly and Thunderbird. Feedly has phone apps if you prefer using your phone. You can search for "RSS Reader" in your app store of choice to find more of them. If you prefer PC software, try searching for "RSS Reader" on the Windows or Apple (PC) App Stores, or like, on GitHub or something.

A cool thing about RSS Feeds is that you don't even have to be notified if you don't want to. Social-Web users are more addicted accustomed to Notifications, but most RSS Readers allow you to silently let Notifications pile up in tidy folders (separated by which site the notification comes from), so instead of being constantly called to look at new media, you can binge updates when you decide that it's time to surf the Web some more.

I think this might be more of a Social Media Guy™ one, but some Small-Web Netizens do have Mailing Lists or Newsletters you can subscribe to in order to get emails containing lists of updates. These are typically sent monthly, or sometimes even slower and more sporadic than that.

Challenge: what if, unlike on the Social-Web, you didn't need to be called back over and over to consume more content. Would it really be so bad to wait until you think about someone, and when you do, manually go over to their site to check out what's new and catch up? Most Small-Web Netizens have a ChangeLog or a Dev Diary that you can view to easily determine what has changed since the last time you visited.

The way Social Media's UX constantly calls us back to our friends, combined with our species' sensitivity to Social Stress, especially the social stress of ignoring people we care about and who we want to like us, is such a perfect formula to entrap us. Try to wriggle free.

Current Conclusion

I think that's it, for now. This is in the File Cabinet, so expect updates there. Every time I run into some sort of mental roadblock or hurdle, I'll be updating the guide. If not for others, for myself.

Feedly Conclusion

…but for y'all, I'm leaving this post as is. Cheers. ✌️