Small Internet, Big Privacy: Cozy Alternatives to Big Tech

The internet used to feel like a neighborhood potluck. Now it feels like a mall food court run by three landlords who track your crumbs.

We all remember when the internet was small. When you had a blog with a hit counter. When you knew all 87 people who followed you on Twitter and one of them was definitely your mom's second account. When an algorithm was just something your CS professor made you write on a whiteboard.

Then we scaled. And scaled. And scaled until the cozy corner of the internet became a 4 billion-person panopticon with infinite scroll and targeted ads for the exact pair of socks you thought about for 0.8 seconds.

I'm not here to tell you to go live in a cabin and churn butter. I love technology. I build on it. But I'm tired of renting my digital life from companies that see me as an inventory slot for advertisers.

So I went looking for the Small Internet. The one that still exists, in the cracks between the monoliths. It's weirder, slower, more human, and — crucially — it doesn't want to read your DMs to sell you protein powder.

Welcome to the cozyweb.

1. The Big Tech Hangover

Let's be honest about what we traded.

Google traded curiosity for surveillance. You search "why am I anxious at 3am" and you get a therapy ad for the next 6 months.

Meta traded connection for addiction. You wanted to see your cousin's baby photos, you got a rage-bait industrial complex optimized for time-on-site.

X / Twitter traded conversation for... well, whatever that is now. A billionaire's group chat where you're the product and the content moderator.

TikTok traded creativity for the most effective attention-harvesting machine ever invented by humans. It's brilliant. It's also terrifying.

The pattern is the same: free product, massive scale, extract data, sell attention, enshittify. Cory Doctorow nailed the term. The platforms get worse for users as they get better for shareholders. It's not a bug, it's the business model.

The Small Internet asks a different question: What if we optimized for people, not eyeballs?

2. The Cozy Stack: My Current Rotation

I didn't go cold turkey. I replaced things one by one. Like switching from fast fashion to stuff that actually lasts.

For Search: Kagi + Marginalia

Google is unusable now. It's 40% ads, 30% SEO spam, 30% Reddit threads begging you to add "reddit" to your search.

Kagi is $10/month and it's what search felt like in 2012. No ads. No tracking. Just results. You can downrank Pinterest. You can boost your favorite blogs. You pay with money, not with your search history. Revolutionary concept.

When I want to wander, I use Marginalia. It's a search engine that deliberately surfaces non-commercial, old-school websites. The kind made by a guy in 2007 who really loves restoring vintage toasters. It's the anti-algorithm.

For Messaging: Signal

If your messaging app has ads, you don't have a messaging app, you have a data collection device that also sends messages.

Signal is boring in the best way. It's open source, end-to-end encrypted, run by a nonprofit. No stickers you have to buy. No AI reading your breakup texts to train its model. It just works. Your paranoid crypto friend and your mom can both use it.

For Notes & Writing: Obsidian

Notion is great until you realize all your second brain lives on someone else's server and could be paywalled tomorrow. Obsidian stores everything as plain markdown files on your computer. It's fast, offline-first, infinitely customizable, and will still open in 30 years. It's yours. Like actual property.

For Browsing: Arc / Firefox + uBlock Origin

The least sexy, most impactful switch. A good browser with a real ad-blocker turns the modern web from a Las Vegas strip into a quiet library. Try browsing Instagram's website without logging in with and without uBlock. It's two different internets.

3. The Big One: Social Media Without the Overlords

This is the hardest to replace because social media is where our people are. Network effects are a hell of a drug.

Mastodon is great. I have an account. It's like moving to a very earnest co-op where everyone reads the meeting minutes. I respect it deeply. But it still feels like Twitter with better politics.

What I wanted was something that felt like the early internet and understood the modern internet. Something where I actually own my identity. Where I can't be de-platformed because a moderator woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Where developers can build weird, fun stuff on top without begging for API access.

That thing is Farcaster.

If Twitter and Discord had a baby that was raised by crypto-anarchists who actually read the early cypherpunk mailing lists, it would be Farcaster.

Here’s the pitch without the pitch: Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social network. That’s a fancy way of saying: your account, your followers, your posts — they live on a protocol, not on a company's database. Think email, not Gmail. Anyone can build a client for it, like anyone can build an email app.

The main client right now is Warpcast, and it feels like what Twitter felt like in 2018 before everything went feral. People are building things. People are being weird and smart. There are no ads. Your feed is chronological by default, or you can choose an algorithm you actually like. The vibe is builder-energy, not doom-scroll energy.

The magic is in what it enables:

You own your social graph. On Farcaster, your username is yours onchain. If Warpcast disappears tomorrow, you take your 500 followers and move to another app. Try doing that with Instagram.

Developers are first-class citizens. Because it’s open, people are building Frames — little mini-apps right inside a post. You can mint an NFT, play a game, vote in a poll, buy a coffee, all without leaving the feed. It’s what we thought the social web would become before it became five blue apps trying to keep you trapped.

It filters for humans. To sign up, you pay a small fee (around $5/year) to store your data onchain. It’s not about the money, it’s about friction. That tiny cost nukes 99% of bots and spam farms. Suddenly you’re talking to actual people again. Novel concept.

It’s not perfect. It’s still small. That’s the point. It’s small enough that you can know people. That you can post something dumb and not have it become a Main Character moment for 100k strangers. It’s cozy. It’s got that 2008 internet feeling of “we’re all figuring this out together.”

The Small Internet isn’t about being anti-tech. It’s about being pro-human. Farcaster gets that.

If you want to poke around, I have an invite code — the network is still invite-curated to keep the vibes intact:

Sign up here and come find me on the cozy side.

Use it. Don’t use it. But if you’re tired of screaming into a void owned by a guy who sells cars and rockets, maybe it’s time to try a void you actually own a piece of.

4. How to Shrink Your Internet (Without Becoming a Luddite)

You don't have to delete everything. The goal isn't purity, it's leverage. Make the Big Tech stuff less central.

Rule 1: Pay for good software. If it's free and venture-backed, you are the business model. A $5/month app that respects you is cheaper than a free app that harvests you. Do the math on your attention.

Rule 2: Own your root identity. Get a domain name. It’s $12/year. Put up a simple site, even if it’s just a link tree you control. Start a newsletter on Substack or Beehiiv or Paragraph where you own the email list. Your followers on someone else's platform are rented. Your email list and your domain are owned.

Rule 3: Default to small. Before you go to Amazon, check if the small shop sells it. Before you ask ChatGPT, check Kagi. Before you post on X, post on Farcaster first and cross-post if you must. Make the cozy thing the default and the big thing the exception. It rewires your brain.

Rule 4: Embrace inefficiency. The Big Internet wants everything instant and frictionless. The Small Internet is a little slower. You have to wait for the Mastodon server to load. You have to pay for search. You have to curate your own feed instead of letting an algorithm rage-bait you. That friction is where your humanity sneaks back in.

We were sold a lie that bigger is better. That more users, more scale, more engagement equals more value. It doesn't.

For a long time, the internet felt like a big city — exciting, anonymous, full of possibility. Now it feels like a big city where every street has a camera and every conversation is being recorded for ad targeting.

The Small Internet feels like moving back to a neighborhood. You know the shop owner. You wave at the regulars. You have a favorite bench. It’s not as big. It’s better.

It’s still out there. You just have to look for the small doors.

Building in the cozy corner? I’m @numbpilled on Farcaster. Come say hi. Bring weird ideas.

And if you’re ready to reclaim your feed: its a click away.