Keeping the web small
Following on from recent thoughts on building it even though they might not come and reading Robin Rendle's So Many Websites via Imperfect, which looks at the failure of search engines and the expectations of reach.
I can feel the disappointment in the conversations I’ve been listening to, as if the whole point of the web is to exist at bewildering, eye-watering scale.
The web was okay before the big search engines. We survived. With hand curated directories and listings. And there is so much discoverability now that doesn't need the big search engines - those directories and listings are back, webrings are back, niche search engines are here. I've got a list in my links.
I've never been interested in numbers. My wife says I've got no ambition, which is true. I am blessedly free of ambition. But my interests have always been niche and I like that. I like being part of a smaller audience. I've fully internalised the "you can't be all things to all people" spiel.
It's okay to make something just for one person! For five people. To say 'only a few thousand readers' or whatever is wild to me. Only? That is already a huge scale. How long would it take me to read a story to a few thousand individuals? Impossible.
We've been skewed by impossible numbers. Numbers and reaches that are unnaturally large, dangerously large. We have seen this, this has been proven. Infinite growth on our finite planet leads to our destruction.
We need to bring ourselves back to reality. Human-scale. A conversation with five people is a sizable conversation. I'd struggle to fit fifty people in my house. That's the metric my mother uses. How many people you can fit in your house. And she was in politics, pre-internet. So she knows about trying to have conversations with a few thousand people.
When I was starting on the web thirty years ago the amazing thing wasn't the scale but the space. The point wasn't to talk to everyone but that you were able to talk to anyone. Freed from geography to find people like you, who cared about the things you cared about, wherever they were in the world at the other end of these wires.