Posts about SmolWeb, Gemini protocol and LowTech
What s up on the smolweb? July 2026 roundup 2026-07-30 06:15 Summer is here, the big web is choking on AI slop, and the smolweb keeps quietly growing. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in July 2026. Geminispace approaching 3,500 active capsules On July 26, Techrights reported that the Lupa crawler (the main Geminispace survey) now…
The perfect equipment set 2026-07-28 19:30 People often ask me what I actually use, day to day, to do the things I write about here. The honest answer is: not much. Four devices, a couple of cables, and a strong opinion about each one. This is that list, and why each item earns its place. I am not interested in the "latest and greatest". I am interested in a set that fits together, lasts, and does…
I am a smolweb advocate and, sometimes, I use LLMs. 2026-05-02 19:15 I spend a lot of time thinking about simplicity. Fewer dependencies, lighter pages, tools that do one thing well. So yes, it might look strange that I also spend time talking to large language models. Let me explain where I draw the line, and why I think the contradiction is smaller than it appears. What I avoid I do not use LLMs…
The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client 2026-04-09 18:30 I love the Fediverse. I have been on it for years, and it remains the only social network where I actually enjoy spending time. No algorithmic feed pushing outrage, no dark patterns, no surveillance capitalism. Just people talking to each other over an open protocol. But every time I wanted to recommend it to someone, I ran into the…
All my clients wanted a carousel, now it s an AI chatbot! 2026-03-14 12:55 It always starts the same way. The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor s website, and holds the screen up like evidence. "You see? They have one of those." A little bubble. Bottom right corner. Blinking... For years, that gesture was about carousels. Every homepage had to have one, big, slow,…
Building your first smolweb page 2026-03-01 12:05 A simple news article that takes ten seconds to load and eats 50 MB of data. You ve seen that. We all have. Mountains of JavaScript, giant CSS frameworks, third-party trackers, custom fonts pulled from remote servers... all of that to display a few paragraphs of text. The smolweb pushes back against that. The goal is to write small, clean,…