Why I fell in love with the small web

2025-01-09, 14:51 CET

I am pretty sure someone already wrote something like this, but I still need to get this off my chest.

Ever since I owned my first computer with internet access, I have been on IRC. It started with expeditions into the big, old networks like DALnet, where I met a lot of interesting and sometimes weird people. People who I, an insecure teenager in rural Germany, would never have met offline. With my first girlfriend, I had a "couple's channel", but we would soon invite other people from school and, again, those we met on IRC. This channel persisted for over 20 years. It survived the rise and fall of "social networks" and now consists of a group of people I call my friends, even though I never met some of them.

IRC is an old technology that just will not die. It peaked in the mid 2000s, a time before smartphones. Since then, corporate technologies like WhatsApp, Slack and discord have taken over large swaths of the userbase. They did that by making decisions for the user: clients and servers are chosen for them. Anything beyond installing an app is considered a nuisance. IRC is not owned by anyone. It was developed at a publicly funded university and people are free to build client and server software to work with it. It is still active and new servers are started regularly. It provides fast and reliable text-based messaging and little beyond that.

Meanwhile, big technology corporations, at least for some time, did not look evil. Sure, they built software monopolies and raked in billions by selling data. But now, one after the other bows to a president with an agenda to turn the USA into white ethnonationalist oligarchy, to annex parts of Europe and to cause chaos among its former llies. I would never have expected Twitter, which helped me build my career as a scientist, to become a propaganda machine for the far right. As I am writing this, Mark Zuckerberg announces that he will not only remove fact checking from Facebook and Instagram and drastically change the rules to allow hate speech. Meta services now openly permit allegations of "mental illness" tied to gender or sexual orientation under the guise of "political and religious disource", a remarkable departure from its once-liberal stance.

So here we are, once again learning that big tech corporations are never, ever, interested in the common good when selling their products or harvesting your data. If they need to, they will actively engage in shaping a future aligned with nationalist and exclusionary politics. I was happy to discover the Gemini protocol during these uncertain and scary times. The idea of web pages that all work the same way appealed to me. Just like the older Gopher protocol, every page is organized following the same set of very simple rules. This means that users only have to "get" one Gemini page to understand how all the others work. The pages load incredibly quickly even when using minimal hardware since only plain text is transmitted. Given today's fiber connections and 5G mobile internet, this might seem as unnecessary, but thinking about how much CO2 the internet produces and how strongly this will increase in the near future, this could be worth thinking about.

Much like IRC and Gopher, the "build your own" ethos of Gemini resonates with with me. Even with my limited programming skills, I can directly work with the protocol. Browsing the "gemspace" is delightfully fast and convenient. It's a surprisingly large and complex sphere. Even though all sites work the same way, the variance in content is huge. I can be sure that the sites do not track or otherwise bother me. This reduces my browsing experience by many, quite annoying aspects: many WWW pages are far too complex, the advertising is becoming more and more intrusive and the content is being plastered with SEO stuff.

My hope is that open, lightweight protocols like Gemini, but also Gopher (which is remarkably active as I have learned), IRC and even good old Finger can do their part in reclaiming the digital commons from those who try to control and squeeze it for profit and political power.