It’s Time To Go Back to Web 1.0

Invasive tracking and pay-for-play search engines has broken the internet. It’s time to reclaim our independence with the Small Web.

Guys, I’m tired.

Like most people, day in and day out I’m on the internet viewing websites, searching, using social media, and doing the things that are simply commonplace. But standing in this firehose of connectivity is also exhausting. Ads, cookie consents, popups asking for you to subscribe, paywalls, tracking notifications, forms to require you give up your email or phone number in order to do basic things, etc etc etc.

What the hell is going on with the modern web?

In two words: data mining. But in reality, it’s the Enshittification of something each of us have experienced daily for a decade or three. We’ve been boiling in the pot for so long we’ve forgotten what we’ve lost. There’s a “ Digital Sovereignty” that existed at the beginning of the Internet. You purchased goods, searched on sites, and did your thing. If you wanted to give information to a website or make a purchase, you chose to do that. Then the companies got greedy.

Cookies, which were designed simply to save your information when you re-visited a site were abused into oblivion. Now instead of just…