I have been playing around with https://neocities.org/ and https://techrights.org/gemini/ and found some gemini/gopher links that were pretty cool. I was wondering if we had a community for “small web” sites. AKA sites that are maintained by a small collective or individual hosters.? Or just people wanting to have fun online again?
EDIT: Thanks everyone!
I went ahead and created a super-feed for the communities that were identified below:
https://piefed.social/f/smallweb
~smallweb@piefed.social
If your on piefed, you can subscribe. to the feed.
It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg issue - the tools are there, but the business model of hosting a website is not sustainable for small or niche communities (especially with AI scraping causing strain and horrible ad rates), so not many people are motivated to create them.
At the same time, unless someone creates and maintains the sites, communities can’t form and spread through word of mouth. If you can get a group of like minded folks willing to bear the upfront costs, give it a go, and people will come. But I doubt such sites will spring up on their own anymore in the 2020s.
This reads like someone broken by capitalism. I’m sorry, buddy.
I live in the USA, so I guess that checks out.
I mean your complaints are valid, but even if you’re using a VPS, it shouldn’t cost you not than $5-10/mo. With self-hosting probably even less.
We’re not talking like a lemmy or masto instance here.
I have several personal websites on the small web, and people do visit. It’s actually lovely.
I self-host my own game servers for my friends and communities, so I know it’s definitely possible to run stuff on a budget. I’m just thinking a forum or blog/message board site, even for niche subjects, will get scraped to death and may outpace your initial resources allocated, so the only way to sustain that is having a benevolent owner.
Then again, I could be thinking way larger scale than what OP is thinking.