Adële's blog

What's up on the small web? August 2026 roundup

2026-08-30 12:15

Summer rolls on, and the small web had a busy month: a major Lagrange release, a new graphical client for Android and desktop, terminal tools crossing v2.0, and some good community debates. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in August 2026.

Geminispace past 5,000 known capsules

On August 24, Lupa (Stéphane Bortzmeyer's Gemini crawler) published a fresh snapshot: 5,171 capsules known, with 3,520 of them reachable recently. That is up from 3,273 recently-reachable capsules at the end of January, so the modest summer growth keeps going. Median gemtext page weight: 963 bytes.

The lightweight theme also produced the best figure of the month, thanks to skyjake on the BBS: the median web page weighs about 3 MB, the median Gemini page 1.3 KB, roughly 2,300 times smaller. lars_the_bear added the right caveat: the advantage comes from how people use Gemini (mostly text), not from the protocol itself, which lacks proper caching support.

Sources:

Lagrange 1.21: inline prompts at last

The event of the month. skyjake solved a problem that had been open since 2021: input prompts now render inline on the page instead of popping a modal dialog. Prompt-loop games like SpellBinding become playable hands-on-keyboard, and BBS or Station get inline reply fields you can navigate away from and back to.

The release also adds support for gophers:// (Gopher over TLS, with TOFU certificates) and new Arm64 Windows builds. skyjake calls it "the biggest step forward for the app's user experience in years".

Sources:

New clients and tools

Also worth watching: Haze launched Northwire Mail, a fully-featured Misfin server supporting both Misfin(B) and Misfin(C). And ittsmatrixx announced a new Gemini search engine and archive, asking capsules to submit domains for indexing. New search attempts in Geminispace tend to end with the crawler rate-limited to death, so wish them luck.

Can you ditch the BigWeb?

The liveliest debate of the month: whether the small web is an escape hatch or a complement. Thoughts on Ensmallening the BigWeb by shizukado argues the two happily coexist, with the fediverse still providing enormous benefit.

Could RootBadger become Usenet 2.0?

Ch1ffr3punk promoted a new NNTP-backed service with a web interface and invite links, and a good thread followed on the BBS. davep flagged odd signals around who built it and a generative-AI smell, kirihito and lars_the_bear noted that without federation it is not really Usenet (though Thunderbird over NNTP-over-TLS does work nicely), and jecxjo suggested lobste.rs-style invite accountability. No verdict, but an interesting snapshot of what the smolnet crowd expects from a community platform.

Source: RootBadger thread (BBS)

Notable gemlogs

The introductions subspace also had a fresh wave of newcomers through the end of August, including hardelli, who joined "out of frustration to the modern interwebs". A comforting sign of the pendulum still swinging our way.

IndieWeb

HTML Day 2026 (August 8) saw gatherings in San Diego, Amsterdam (at Internet Archive Europe HQ), London and elsewhere, all about getting together to write plain HTML. Source: html.energy

Brennan Kenneth Brown published "WEBMASTER, a manifesto for everyone", a 22-minute piece on the role of the webmaster, from the first one ever (Louise Addis at Stanford, 1993) to today, explicitly embracing the smolweb and pushing back against the "agentic web" trend.

Kagi & small web search

Kagi added an opt-in "Exclude paywalled websites" toggle on August 21, removing paywalled results from search. Early commenters called it a killer feature. The Kagi Small Web feed now lists 4,894+ human-authored posts and remains open-source. And Orion for Windows, Kagi's genuinely independent browser engine, is targeting a late-2026 release, with no public beta yet.

Small web picks

Takeaway

August 2026 was an excellent month for smolnet tooling. Lagrange finally killed the modal prompt, a polished cross-platform graphical client appeared out of nowhere, and the terminal crowd got certificate management and themed amusement. The Geminispace keeps growing slowly, past 5,000 known capsules. The community debates about leaving the BigWeb are becoming more nuanced: less "quit everything", more "coexist on your own terms".

The small web is not going to displace the big web. But it does not need to. It just needs to be a place where people can read, write, and think without 14 tracking pixels per page.

See you next month. Keep it smol.