About the Small Internet
============================

I have recently read several interesting posts about the concept of a
"Small Internet", focused on federations of services offered by users to
users and based on simple, text-based, neat protocols. I personally find
the idea and the discussion very interesting, and stimulating.

At first, the very concept of Small Internet could look plainly
counterintuitive: we are currently living in the era where the large
majority of humans will have access to the Internet, in a form or
another. Nevertheless, I agree that the idea of Small Internet is more
relevant today than ever before. The reason is simple: the Large
Internet, out there, dominated by the World Wide Web, user profiling,
and (anti-)social alienating networks, has destroyed one of the most
intriguing and "human" aspects of the Internet, i.e., the possibility
for communities of peers to gather, grow, prosper and thrive around a
small set of shared values.

The main issue with the Large Internet (as I said in a post on the
circumlunar.space bbs) is that information sharing has been transformed
in an intrinsically asymmetric process: the vast majority of the web
users just "consume" information and services provided by a small
minority of editors and producers. Such an asymmetry almost naturally
creates a market: if consumers want more content (or services, or news)
they have to play to the rules of that market, and either pay for what
they want to get or accept to become themselves "products" to be sold in
the same market (which is what the whole ads business is about, in the
end).

On the contrary, the Small Internet, where federated pubnix nodes share
their resources and encourage their users to collaborate and distribute
content and knowledge, has the potential to re-establish a fair balance
between information production and consumption. In the Small Internet,
everybody *participates* to the process of information creation.
Participating is much more than just producing or consuming. Only
participation can lead to caring for your fellow Internet peers.  

However, an important pre-condition for Small Internets to accomplish
this goal is to *remain* small. There have been several (laudable)
attempts to "import" web content in gopher. Surely there is interesting
stuff on the web, but I personally see little value in massively
transforming entire websites into a set of automatically-generated (and
eventually anonymous) gophermaps. The "quantity" of information
"liberated" from the web in this way, does not necessarily contribute to
the quality, variety, and uniqueness of most of the content made
available through Gopher.   

The Small Internet makes sense if it allows its participants to know
each other, to establish meaningful relations, to trust each other, to
care for each other, and to build on their own strengths. 

The Small Internet makes sense only if it remains a human-sized place,
where human-sized experiences are lived, and human-sized stories are
told. 

The Small Internet makes sense if it allows communities of peers to form
and grow.

The Small Internet can succeed only if it remains Small.