The Quiet Return of the Small Web

Something unexpected is happening at the edges of the internet: people are building personal websites again. Hosting services aimed at individuals report their strongest growth in a decade, and RSS reader downloads have tripled since 2024.

The trend is partly a reaction. As major platforms lean harder into algorithmic recommendation, a growing group of users wants spaces they control — no feed, no ranking, no ads wedged between posts. A personal site, the argument goes, is the only place online where you set all the rules.

The demographics surprise researchers. This isn't nostalgia from people who remember the early web; the fastest-growing cohort of new site builders is under twenty-five, discovering personal publishing for the first time and treating it as the alternative platform.

Tooling has quietly caught up, too. A new generation of site builders has stripped the process to minutes, and modern hosting makes a personal site effectively free to run. The technical barrier that killed previous revivals has mostly dissolved.

Whether the small web stays small is the interesting question. Previous revivals faded when attention drifted back to the big platforms. This time, its builders seem to consider smallness the entire point.