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Aral Balkan’s personal web site. Covers small technology as an alternative to big tech and surveillance capitalism, human rights in the digital age (cyborg rights), personhood, and democracy.

Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:

This is my application to get NLnet funding to work on Domain as part of the User-Operated Internet Fund1 I feel it’s important that such grant applications are made public so everyone has visibility into the process. This will allow us to collectively learn from the experience and perhaps even to improve the process itself. As such, I’ll be making my end of the process as public as possible by not only sharing my original grant application but any subsequent communication I receive during the process.

[Moved to Codeberg] Domain enables people to seamlessly get started with their own place on the Small Web in under a minute. - small-tech/domain

[Moved to Codeberg] Domain enables people to seamlessly get started with their own place on the Small Web in under a minute. - small-tech/domain

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #27 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Feb, 2023): End-to-end encrypted Kitten Chat (an example peer-to-peer Small Web app using Kitten. Follow the tutorial to build it yourself from scratch or browse the source code). In this hour-and-a-half long Small is Beautiful live stream recording, I show you how WebSockets, project-specific secrets, and authenticated routes work in Kitten and migrate a centralised WebSocket chat application to an end-to-end-encrypted peer-to-peer Small Web chat application in Kitten.

Download the video and watch it with your favourite video player. Recording1 of the live stream of a computer science colloquium on the Small Web I presented at the University of Groningen on June 11th, 2024. (Transcript) Update: I was going back and forth between calling the personal social network Place and Yarn. In the talk, I refer to it as Yarn. As I’ve been working more on it, I’ve reverted to its original name, Place.

We’re a tiny and independent two-person not-for-profit based in Ireland. We’re working on building the Small Web.

Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:

Another day, another application for funding from the commons for our work on realising the Small Web for the common good.

Interactive embed (play with it) Kitten Kawaii is a Kitten port of React Kawaii by Miuki Miu (Elizabet Oliveira) that you can play with in the interactive embed above (also try it out in its own window/tab so you can see its responsiveness and URL-based state). I stumbled on Muiki Miu’s (Elizabet Oliveira’s) adorable React Kawaii web site and wanted to use one of the characters in my Kitten app.

Aral Balkan’s personal web site. Covers small technology as an alternative to big tech and surveillance capitalism, human rights in the digital age (cyborg rights), personhood, and democracy.

Aral’s been making things with computers since he was 7 years old. // Progressive enhancement, innit? ;) const years = Math.round((new Date().getTime() - new Date('1983-11-08').getTime())/1000/60/60/24/365) document.write(`(That’s approximately ${years} years ago. And yes, he still thinks computers are magic portals into endless universes.)`) Along the way, he dabbled in Flash, did some consulting, taught some workshops, gave a few talks, organised a smattering of conferences, made some apps, helped launch an after-school coding initiative for kids, got rather enraged by Silicon Valley’s bullshit, and co-founded Small Technology Foundation to do something about it.