When the Independent Web Connects Too Much

I've spent years trying to figure out what I actually want from the internet. I'm old enough to remember when getting online took intention and patience, and the web felt like a huge collection of places waiting to be found. You could spend hours following links from one personal site to another with no idea where you'd end up. I don't miss dial-up, broken websites, or searching for anything before search engines got good. I do miss the feeling that the internet belonged to the people using it, not to a handful of corporations trying to monetize every second of our attention. In August I wrote about the differences between the small web and federation, and my thinking hasn't changed much. The Fediverse, the IndieWeb, and the loosely defined smolweb all have qualities I appreciate. They also have shortcomings that sometimes make me wonder whether we're building something better or just recreating old problems with new technology. A recent discussion about Webmentions, privacy, and the…

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