The smolnet of smol things

Date: 1 Jul 2020

It's not particularly difficult to put a blog on the Web. It doesn't even have to cost anything, if you go with a service like Wordpress. With the right set-up, the only hard part remaining is figuring out what to say.

The obvious question, then, when faced with the continued existence of Gopher (and the recent creation of Gemini), is why? Why would anyone use what might as well be called the Small Internet ("smolnet") over the Web? On the face of it, the smolnet has many disadvantages:

Low number of users relative to the Web

Higher barrier of entry (for both reading and writing)

Many limitations (e.g. no JS, almost no styling)

The obvious answer is that these limitations are not bugs but features, to a certain kind of person -- and since you're reading this on the smolnet, you presumably have your own reasons why these limitations don't put you off.

It's fairly common for users who join the smolnet to write about why they did so (whether immediately or eventually), and if there's a common theme so far it's probably best summed up by the About page on republic.circumlunar.space and this bit in particular:

> It is completely non-commercial and offers a text-based haven for those frustrated by the corporate takeover, bloat and ever-present surveillance of the modern web.[1]

1. The principle of least privilege

The point of these restrictions is that they prevent *ab initio* uses that are deemed to be undesirable and unwelcome. Gopher was designed before the Web became what it is today, but the idea that Gopher's restrictions keep it pure and free of bloat, surveillance, etc. crops up reasonably often in current justifications people give for using Gopher. The logic is explicit in Solderpunk's design of the Gemini protocol, which they explain in their FAQ:

> Gemini is designed with an acute awareness that the modern web is a privacy disaster, and that the internet is not a safe place for plaintext. Things like browser fingerprinting and Etag-based "supercookies" are an important cautionary tale: user tracking can and will be snuck in via the backdoor using protocol features which were not designed to facilitate it. Thus, protocol designers must not only avoid designing in tracking features (which is easy), but also assume active malicious intent and avoid designing anything which could be subverted to provide effective tracking. This concern manifests as a deliberate non-extensibility in many parts of the Gemini protocol.[2]

This focus on restrictions is refreshing. There's often an assumption that a technology is powerful when they don't limit what users can do with it. This attitude of radical openness is a founding principle of the Internet (see also: end-to-end principle).[3] It's also come back to bite us in the collective ass (see also: adtech).[4]

There's a saying that originated from debates about copyright infringement online that "the answer to the machine is in the machine", or that problems arising from the technologies we create can be solved by those technologies as well. The same might be said about the Web, and this is the implicit position of those who are e.g. fighting against intrusive advertising via ad-blockers, or against useless bloat by using tools like NoScript.

Gopher and Gemini represent a different approach, a move away from a rich ecosystem that by its very openness can support desirable and undesirable niches alike, to a simpler system that intentionally limits what users can do, in an analogue to the infosec principle of least privilege, because it assumes that functionality that can be abused will be.[5]

2. The Great^H^H^H^H^H^H Smol Filter

These restrictions are interesting to me not merely because of their direct effects (no javascript! no cookies!) but because of their second- and even third-order effects. In brief: they can be thought of as filters.

Easily overlooked

Everyone's on the Web; it's the default. The smolnet is not the default, and even if you find out about it, it takes a little bit of work to get access (obtaining a suitable client) or to put content up on it. The user base of the smolnet is almost certainly dwarfed by the number of users on the Web. The smolnet is *easily ignored*.

Being easily ignored is a form of protection in itself; think of it as camouflage from predators, or as a kind of filtering mechanism that's needed because not all potential users are desirable.

Inhospitable to big things

That's not enough, though: the restrictions inherent in the smolnet mean that the ecosystem is not complex or rich enough to support certain niches, certain kinds of use. It's difficult to extract value, and that limits what the smolnet can sustain. As a result, the smolnet is ecologically simple.

Being inhospitable to big things is a form of protection, because while it means the smolnet is not going to have its own Amazon or Facebook, it's not going to have its own Amazon or Facebook. Its limits are its strengths. The absence of giants means that small things can flourish.

3. The smolnet of smol things

I want to go back to the question I asked earlier: why the smolnet when we have the Web? This time I want to propose a different answer. It's not that the smolnet is non-commercial, or that it's free of bloat and surveillance, though those are certainly factors. It's the second-order stuff.

There's a book called *The Cluetrain Manifesto*, going over how marketing has changed (has to change) because what worked before will not work on the Internet.[6] It started with 95 theses, two of which stuck with me:

> Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. [...] People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

I think that's the thing about the Web today. The Web has lost its human voice. It feels like a place dominated by giant and inhuman players, that at times speak in an uncanny simulacrum of a human voice.

The smolnet, on the other hand, is smol.

It's not commercialised, its got too small a user base to be particularly worth targeting, and its restrictions prevent a lot of obvious ways for a user to "extract value". There's not much to gain by coming here.

That means the only reason people come here is because they want to. It's a network of smol users no longer running around under the shadows of giants, drawn here by curiosity and incentivised to remain here by the smol things they put out on the network for each other.

And that means the human-to-noise ratio is *amazing*.

The smolnet is a place of conversation among human beings, conducted in a human voice. Long may it remain that way.

Links

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]