I found some nice curate collections of small blogs on a recent HN post about RSS. Some of these are:

• blogs.hn
• ooh.directory
• [BROKEN LINK: blogroll.org]
• [BROKEN LINK: wiby.org]

Kagi's SmallWeb is another similar example, and is ultimately a text file in githib. If you want to be listed, make a pull request.

All these examples of decent indeces makes me question the idea that web indeces are natural monopolies.

I've been thinking about this smallweb ecosystem a lot. I like the idea of building internet navigation via push-oriented indeces, rather than the scraping-oriented ones we have now; submit your site to the indeces to be listed. The indeces will have to currate to avoid noise though, but I really think that's a solvable problem.

Before I go to the effort of submitting my sites to these indeces, I want guarentees that they won't later betray me– I want to be sure that I contribute to open, forkable indeces. That's the tell-tale sign that we need a protocol, although I'm not sure its really necessary– almost seems like a mediawiki instance or a git repo would do the job just fine.

There's a similar need in DishFork: If you're going to make an open database of recipes, you want other people who fork the DB to also contribute back upstream.