The Small Internet

The internet used to be small. At first simply because there weren't many people there yet, of course, but it felt small to me until the mid-2000s. Even as hundreds of millions of people got online, we were still all sorted into smaller places: forums, chat rooms, blogs, the haunts of the early web. And it felt small because it was just one part of your life — something you'd go sit down to do like watching a movie, rather than the cosmic microwave background of modern life it is now.

Ignore the cynics. The Internet Is Good Actually^{1You are reading this because of the internet. QED.}, so people kept coming and the internet's role kept expanding. We got devices that could let us fit a little online time into all those unused 5-minute slices of the day, and we got the megaplatforms that harnessed the growing scale of the internet and put it to work: they built products that could be used by almost anyone, and as they reached more people they could print money and invest in the products and infrastructure in a way that the smaller places couldn't keep up with. Everyone thinks about Facebook here, but almost everything went this way. Hundreds of thousands of websites eventually became subreddits.

So the internet got big because the population was growing and our real lives were increasingly mediated by it, and the public online spaces grew and strained to adapt. Social media went from friends to acquaintances to strangers, from curious early adopters to ragebaiters. It was fun, and then it wasn't, and a lot of us have retreated to places like text threads and Discords, the contemporary internet's version of those old small spaces.

The new spaces aren't ours. We have no say in anything other than who we share them with, because they're rooms in someone else's building. The march to scale has brought us a few very nice, well-crafted, least-common-denominator platforms that operate like utilities. Your five-person text thread can probably withstand multiple concurrent datacenter outages. We have a hybrid human/AI apparatus patrolling for bad actors at Earth scale. But giants generally trade being able to see farther for being able to see fine details. They can't see you individually. That feature you want? Better hope millions of other people want it too, or the giant will never notice.

Is there a real need here and an opportunity to serve it? Is this more than simple nostalgia? I put my money where my mouth is and started a company about it, so I obviously think so. But it's fair to ask: if this is a real opportunity, why are the giants not seeing it?

They can't. The history of computing has not been kind to big heavy things trying to become small.