Mat Duggan

Don't worry about the small web. Most people running the small web don't do it for others but themselves. They don't care whether they have 5 visitors or 1 million. Visitors are just the cherry on top, my main reason for maintaining a small web page is to put down my thoughts, organize them, go back to them if I need to, and helping whichever stranger stumbles upon them along the way.

The small web and indie web audience doesn't use google. They use RSS readers:

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/rss-feeds-send-me-more-traffic-than-google/

https://matduggan.com/you-can-absolutely-have-an-rss-dependent-website-in-2026/

Small web is there to stay, big tech can't do much about it:

https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/

The only threats to small web are:

* the lack of net neutrality

* lack of competition in the the PC component industry which is the backbone of cheap VPSes and hosting services

* browser monopoly, as any monopolistic browser could impose their small-web-unfriendly version of the web

The author is in devops[1], which intuitively seems like the sort of job that would have that 'not making any significant changes, just working on single files' type of flow that isn't the same flow as a standard dev approach (where it's common to work across an entire repo). So it's understandable from that perspective that they might come to that conclusion.

Put another way, in a software product, you bring down those 500 files because you want to locally make sure that your changes to the 3 files you care about are compatible with the 500 files you don't. In a dev-ops repo, perhaps they are dealing with a situation where small amount of files they deal with have less impact on the whole.

[1]: https://matduggan.com/about-me/

A good answer: "The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism" [1]

And discussion [2].

[1] https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibertarianism/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074952