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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:

smolweb.org promotes simple unbloated web. It provides resources to actors who want to participate.

I’ve given hundreds of talks over the last two decades and beyond. Here are a few of my favourites in chronological order so you can see how my focus and thoughts have evolved through the years. I hope you enjoy them. PS. If you want me to speak about the Small Web at your event, feel free to send a short message to mail@ar.al with the details. PPS. You can see Laura and me live every third Thursday of the month on Small is Beautiful, which we stream from our own Owncast server.

With tensions rising between the USA and Europe over Greenland, the EU has decided that it needs its own European alternative to X. Sticking with the single character naming it is going to be called W.

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:

Privileged ports were a security feature in the days of dumb terminals, in the age of the World Wide Web, they are a security vulnerability.

Questions on Domain from NLnet and our answers as part of the NLnet grant application for Domain.

Here’s a little script I hacked together to install the Language Servers I use for web development in Helix Editor. Please feel free to adapt and use.

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.

Join me as I take you through building Draw Together – a little collaborative drawing toy I made and released over the weekend – from scratch.

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

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.