I too love the idea of the "small web", I've pined for it these last few years as I look back on the web of my childhood where there were many interesting and quirky sites compared to now where everything feels consolidated and interest for non-techies or semi-techies to have their own website is all but gone it seems.
I'dd like to share a website I came across a while back. I can't remember the URL cause sadly I didn't store it.
The site was a personal website of a photographer. It has a very unorthodox design and consisted of a bunch of repeating sections, each for a topic or category of content.
Each of these sections were a list of cards, scrollable in the horizontal direction. Each section has individual scrolling. The cards were either links to articles or high-res images.
The page loaded atrociously slow, and a quick look at the inspector showed why, we loaded about 300MB of images, quite the amount of code and it was clear that the entire site was made by a novice programmer, which made me immediately load all of the images that I could ever scroll into view. Quite the opposite of lean website technically, but definitely a small web website in essence and presentation. I think "small web" websites are small in scope and very personal. But whether or not they are small in size or features is less of a concern to me, I got spare cycles to burn anyways.
I think the web has for a long time lacked identity and personal connection, I hope that the renewed interest in federation and the small web will let more people express themselves more freely.
wave_walnut
psycr0w