Just the Browser Is just the beginning: Why breaking free means building small

The Net is born free, but everywhere is in chains. This is a parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract where he said the same about humans, but it's nonetheless true. The Net is built out of open, free protocols and open, free code. Yet it and we are bound by the rulemakers who build the services and set the laws of the places we go and the things that we do, not to our advantage. Enshittification everywhere, and whatcha gonna do about it?

The ground rules of "open" are like any basic technology. Unintended consequences can make enemies of good ideas. One such is "Like it or fork it." There's lots in modern browsers that people don't like, which is unsurprising with all that tasty personal data flowing through them. So people fork them. They remove the parts they don't like and bolster the bits that they do. Which is such a good idea, there are now hundreds of them. Who wrote them, how different they are, how secure, how buggy, how often updated, how popular? This is not a solution to what ails us.

The Browser as Battleground

Taking things away rather than adding yet more of them seems preferable. That's the philosophy behind Just the Browser, a new approach based on the observation that browsers which are part of an enterprise strategy must enforce obey policies. This subservience means turning off behaviors which enterprises might find objectionable, which includes much that individuals don't like either — if only they could get at the controls. Just the Browser makes that happen. A mainstream browser that respects your space. Imagine that. Less is more has never been truer.

But the browser is only the beginning. Applying that principle more widely is much harder. Data harvesting, AI perversity, misdirection and hoop-jumping make the swamp deeper every day, and that's just from entities that claim legitimacy, the stuff we can see. The sense of overwhelm is ever more pressing, and when that happens there's a standard human response. Nostalgia.

The Small Web as Antidote

This is where the Small Web comes in, or at least where it would like to. As a conscious reaction to corporate power running amok where innocent, enthusiastic human exploration once ruled, this goes back to at least the far off days of 2020, where the notion of the Web Revival was promulgated. Drawing parallels with the folk revival of the 20th century, it promised the Web Unplugged, an independent state of small pages, small servers and human-scale peer-to-peer interaction.

This idea has never prospered, neither has it died. The Small Web concept has seen various codifications of what it means, what it's trying to do, and how it should be built. The original pre-web pioneers who built the first tools for the first pioneer users are largely still out there, as are those tools. Gopher, the leading content explorer and protocol before it got eaten by Tim Berners-Lee's pet Tyrannosaurus rex, is running just fine through proxies or, for the hardcore, applications — never apps, of course. You can quickly get a feel for how things really were by dipping a toe in that way, or check on the latest ambitions of the Small Webbers.

On the plus side, text pages delivered over gigabit networks to multicore gigahertz 64-bit processors are intoxicatingly fast and ridiculously easy to navigate. There are no distractions. There's also not much else. The Small Web is a monastic commune out in the country, proof that you can live free of the modern world, but not that you'd want to.

Proponents talk of self-hosting and peer-to-peer as the only topology, which is great for some but useless for most. Self-hosting worked when there was no alternative, when most users were technical enough to get late-'80s networking going, and most hackers were not yet zygotes. The internet in general, and the web in particular, exploded into a vacuum. The Small Web has yet to find a niche the size of a rock pool.

The Paradox of Scale

Nonetheless, we need it. Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack. The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age. Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it. Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try.

The irony is, we all live in our own small webs, infinitely tiny subsets of all that's on offer. Our social networks are limited by necessity, our content sources are self-curated, our daily lives routine. This makes the Shadow Web a place where content can be shared and discovered but where trackers, cookies and big things don't exist. Finding, filtering, creating and curating content, all can be partially or wholly automated, and the better the experience the more the Small Web will become a true symbiont of the Big. It can never replace the Amazons and YouTubes, but it can put them downtown while we live in the parks and coffeeshops of the civilized outskirts.

Advertising tech? Nein danke. Nothing wrong with adverts that fit the rules - text, simple graphics, served by the content creator, just as in print media. Small Web users are going to be smart, high value users, much as those smart enough to get into the oases of airport lounges. It'll be a good place to experiment with all the good ideas that got squeezed out, like microtransactions that let you buy an article for five pennies, instantly and anonymously. Or sell one of your own, by embedding a single link.

A Moral Imperative

We need the Small Web, and it needs to think big. If it's acceptable that AI is engaged in its own experiment in digesting every byte of content on the Big Web, to engage in a human scale, human intelligence, a humane experiment of our own – one that doesn't boil oceans – is morally mandated. We too can rewire the rules of the online world, and the Small Web is an infinitely better bet for a future on our terms.

You can have fun in chains, but only if you can choose to take them off.

Related Resources

• The Web Revival movement - Community hub for the Small Web initiative
• Gopher protocol - The pre-web content protocol still in use
• Just the Browser project - Enterprise-focused privacy browser framework
• Small Web Manifesto - Principles and technical specifications

The path to digital autonomy isn't through better browser forks or more privacy extensions. It requires building parallel infrastructure that operates on different principles entirely. The Small Web isn't a nostalgic retreat but a necessary evolution—a space where human-scale interaction can flourish without the constant surveillance and manipulation that defines the mainstream web. It's not about rejecting technology but about reclaiming it, one small server, one peer-to-peer connection, one text page at a time.