A few months ago I stumbled upon an interesting site focused on listing sites that are under 1 MB when loading.
I can’t remember exactly from where I got to the 1mb.club, but I really liked the idea behind it as I do think sites don’t need to be heavy.
The site’s about page states
The internet has become a bloated mess. Massive JavaScript libraries. Countless client-side queries. Overly complex frontend frameworks.
But we can make a difference - no matter how small it may seem. 1MB Club is a growing collection of performance-focused web pages found across the internet. All member web pages weigh less than 1 megabyte in page size.
I can totally agree with this.
As much as I prefer to craft a very light and fast site, I have created some that are way above the 1 MB threshold mentioned here. Unfortunately, you can’t win all the battles with the client and the marketing team.
I feel it’s such a waste to create a heavy site. In my mind it’s the same as polluting. Not to mention loading times getting way too large the moment you step outside your big city 5G or fiber optic. This is a rant for another time.
When I was discovering this new site, almost immediately I found out about 2 others that have the exact same idea, but going even further, listing sites that are even smaller on load.
The 3 sites in question:
I managed to get my personal site listed on all those as this one is around 215kb at the moment of writing this.
But I also realized these are amazing collections of sites that you can read!
Most of the people that submitted their entries have some IT knowledge, are passionate about creating a digital garden and maintaining it, and most of them write articles in there from time to time.
You’re entering into someone’s online space to read and learn about them and their ideas.
And this makes it fun!
Sometimes it feels like looking into a time capsule, especially when one of the sites hasn’t been updated in a while. Sometimes you find the /now page and you read what people are up to, what they plan for the next period. Sometimes you learn about some cool projects in their portfolio.
You also realize that is kind of easy to get in contact with someone if you like what they are doing or building. You can just send an email and let them know that you enjoyed an article or that the project they built is cool.
In the past 2 weeks I found myself going to these sites multiple times and just clicking on random entries from there.
Yes, some of the things might not interest me, but it still feels refreshing to explore digital gardens. I really missed this part, as I was under the impression that they are mostly gone. Or maybe I was just looking in the wrong places for too long, as social media tries to keep everything uniform and makes things harder to find.
When I do get bored or tired of my RSS feed I open one of these clubs and click on some sites at random. Some might even go to my RSS feed if I like what I see.
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