Neocities (disclosure: I work on it) has taken steps to try to improve small personal web site discoverability, which ends up being like a platform for people making web sites with a hybrid social component https://neocities.org
I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like "personal web site" or "home pages" but it's never quite stuck for me. I hope they've added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there's some pretty incredible sites available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing easy: https://neocities.org/browse
The framing for this stuff is usually something like "wow remember the crazy 90s web" nostalgia pieces or "this is an active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely space nobody goes to." But really there's some incredible, magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that isn't on the social media super-platforms and people very much still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds of millions of views per month across all the sites, there's still a lot of web surfing going on.
I would actually argue that having a web site gives you more exposure for your content than an average social media account, because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your content organically. Your google search ranking might not be great, but people share links all over the place, including in private channels (think Slack/Discord/IRC/IMs) and you can still get meaningful distribution of your content this way.
To paraphrase @izs "if you build it, they will come", is a misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms I don't myself quite understand yet. It's pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually interesting and know they'll organically get view counts into the millions before it happens.
My ex was a relationship therapist. She was absolutely allergic to letting scar tissue build up. She would tell me about every little negative thing that happened between us. And she would phrase it by talking about her feelings rather than about my actions. ("I felt hurt when I heard you say X," rather than "You shouldn't have said X.")
Suffice it to say, it freaked out. I wasn't used to people sharing their feelings with me. In normal relationships, by the time someone is telling you they feel <insert negative emotion>, a ton of scar tissue has already been built up, and they're at a breaking point. So I was conditioned to believing that sharing feelings = things have gotten really bad.
But early on she would calm me down, and say no, things aren't bad, she's fine, she's just into sharing feelings early and often to prevent the buildup of resentment. So I got used to it, and even started doing the same thing back.
Eventually our relationship ended, but I brought the practice to new relationships I entered afterwards. And, unsurprisingly, it kind of freaked people out! Almost nobody is used to it at first, just like I wasn't. It's incredibly easy to get defensive when someone lets you know that they felt bad in response to something you did. And it's usually vulnerable and risky to find the words to share feelings without arousing the other person's defenses.
Still, when I look back at how I've evolved as a person, I credit this "scar tissue" view of relationships with a lot of personal growth. It's given me a habit of confronting people problems head on, something past-me was unconsciously avoidant of. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and being willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of kicking the can down the road is one of the hallmarks of adulthood and maturity.
Growing up, my dad named all his computers after native trees and plants where we were living. (e.g. Redwood) I’ve carried on doing that! Currently the main computers in the house are Cottonwood, Prickly Pear, Hackberry, and Honeylocust.
I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like "personal web site" or "home pages" but it's never quite stuck for me. I hope they've added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there's some pretty incredible sites available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing easy: https://neocities.org/browse
The framing for this stuff is usually something like "wow remember the crazy 90s web" nostalgia pieces or "this is an active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely space nobody goes to." But really there's some incredible, magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that isn't on the social media super-platforms and people very much still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds of millions of views per month across all the sites, there's still a lot of web surfing going on.
I would actually argue that having a web site gives you more exposure for your content than an average social media account, because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your content organically. Your google search ranking might not be great, but people share links all over the place, including in private channels (think Slack/Discord/IRC/IMs) and you can still get meaningful distribution of your content this way.
To paraphrase @izs "if you build it, they will come", is a misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms I don't myself quite understand yet. It's pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually interesting and know they'll organically get view counts into the millions before it happens.