manifesto
in the age of giant advertising conglomerates building dystopian surveillance machines, predatory social media services hijacking the very chemistry of the human brain in a cold, calculated effort to squeeze every last drop of engagement out of their users, and generative ai being used to infinitely churn out soulless, meaningless slop, the internet can feel like an infinite void of corporate mediocrity.
but it could be so much more. it was, once.
before the oligopolist tech giants and their insatiable hunger for growth at any cost subsumed the web into their walled gardens, the internet was a diverse ecosystem of people making stuff for the sheer joy of it, however they wanted, unbound by the myopic wishes of shareholders. although that era is long gone, there is still hope.
tiny islands glow amidst the void. islands that stand in defiance, in spite even, of the ceaseless tide of corpo sameness. islands built by individuals with intention, with a purpose beyond the cruel logic of algorithms.
if we want an internet worth exploring, we must guide more people to these islands, as well as encourage the creation of new ones. smallweb.cc hopes to be one such guide.
none of this is new, obviously. other projects like neocities and indieweb.org have been advocating for a more humane web for years, and one more website like them won't change things. but maybe, just maybe, it can help.
and if not, at least it was a fun excuse to learn ssr :)
our bots
we use custom crawlers to help speed up some of the tedious parts of the moderation process. the bots are not intelligent and never make decisions on their own; all they do is help out with boring stuff like taking screenshots and extracting metadata.
we take extra care to ensure our bots don't disrupt the websites they visit and don't make any more requests than the average human visitor.
our crawlers identify themselves with the following user agents: smallweb-screenshot, smallweb-index, and smallweb-discovery.
smallweb-screenshot is the main bot. whenever a new website is added to smallweb, this bot takes a screenshot of the homepage and collects some basic metadata like the title and description, prioritizing open graph and twitter card tags when available.
smallweb-index is used to periodically revisit existing websites on smallweb to make sure they're still up and to update their screenshots and metadata if anything has changed. it does basically the same thing as smallweb-screenshot.
smallweb-discovery is a tool we occasionally use to find new websites to add to smallweb. it starts from a selected website and crawls outward, following links to other sites. it doesn't index the websites itself, just gives us a list of potential candidates.
you can identify the bots by their shared ip address: 137.220.62.252. since user agents can be easily faked, the ip address is the most reliable way to tell if a request is from us.
your website, its code, writing, images, etc. will never be shared, sold, or used for anything other than displaying it on smallweb.cc.
if our bots are causing any trouble for your website or if you have any other concerns about them, please let us know at bots [at] smallweb [dot] cc.
contact
if you have a question, comment, concern, suggestion, or just want to say hi, feel free to email me at haley [at] smallweb [dot] cc.
patch notes
(last updated: 2025-10-19)
- new: added language tags for sites with content in languages other than english
- new: overhauled the search system - now with fuzzy matching and full-text search
- todo: submission form coming soon
stats and things
you are visitor number 43,955 (approximately)
server us-north: main/58eb44d
uptime: 18d 2h 43m 55s
smallweb is built using next.js, tailwindcss, and mongodb.
i mildly to moderately dislike all three of those things
but making some sort of custom ssg thing sounded worse