Contacting the small web through email: A semi-formal experiment

"Exploring the small web" has been one of my most successful articles to date.

While I don't currently run analytics, I know that it was a successful article that people enjoyed because... people reached out and told me they liked it!

And upon reflection, I realized that this very metric—"did people contact me"—is one of the most important metrics for me, personally—more critical than "page views", "likes", "bookmarks", "shares", or any other nice, fun, numeric metric like them.

This in turn led me to the following "research question":

Do other small websites' owners also enjoy getting email/comments/replies related to their articles?

My hypothesis is that, yes, everyone loves getting human contact appreciative of something they've done!

But, there's only one way to know... paying it back (or well, paying it forward), and emailing and contacting others, just like I've been contacted a few times in the past. (It's really amazing when it happens! 💚)

Devising an experiment / Method

Similar to how last time I was experimenting with rubrics, this time I'm experimenting with the scientific method. As such, I want to start by devising an experimental method through which I can test my hypothesis, then follow it to gather data, and finally summarize the quantitative and qualitative data. If I'm lucky, I might even have enough data left over to give an answer to the research question I'm starting with! 😁

Now... measuring the appreciation of receiving an email is hard. Surveys work, but would destroy the qualitative experience—as people don't typically send surveys as part of their communication with others.

What I opted to do instead, was take receiving a reply back as a proxy for whether someone appreciated being contacted.

To get the initial list of people to contact, I used my methods from "Exploring the small web" to get to a list of articles I like written by people I don't know, then augmented it with a few articles from my own bookmarks.
Then, for each of those articles, I sent an email using the template below. I tried to not tailor emails too much, as that could end up biasing the measurement of recepients' willingness to respond with my own ability to tailor emails to recipients.

Hey [name/nickname]!

I recently stumbled across your website ([main page link]), through [source, e.g. PowRSS].
And I must say, I really like how [compliment, e.g. your blog blog page looks]! [concrete reason, e.g. Excellent use of colors!]

Reading through your article on [article title restated], I realized I also think that [restated thesis or part of argument].
I was wondering, [related question, e.g. have you found any further work on [topic]?]

Hope you are having a great day,
Bojidar "bojidar-bg" Marinov

P.S. I see you also [something in common, e.g. use Linux]! That's great!

The template is a bit wordy, and includes a compliment as well as a commonality—yet, I figured that as long as I include only one question, the extra content only serves to make it a bit more appealing to reply.

For websites that don't offer an email to contact, I instead tried to use the next best thing, whether that's a chat application, Mastodon account, a comments section, or a guestbook. For a few articles, I ended up without any means of contact in common with the author, so I skipped those.

In total, I planned to contact about 30-40 people, but I ended up with just 11. More than enough for this article, however!

Quantitative data

I carried out this experiment mainly between 2025-06-25 and 2025-06-26, with a few follow-up emails later.

In total, I contacted 11 small website authors, and received 7 or 8 replies back, depending on what counts as a reply. That's a 60~70% reply rate, for this particular sample.
Of those 11 authors, I contacted 10 over Email, and 1 over Mastodon.
On average, I received a reply back in 2 days, with a median response time of 1 day.

As a curiosity, I kept track of points the various sites I contacted had accumulated on Hacker News ("the orange site").
The authors that did not send any reply back had attracted an average of 209~270 (depending on how replies are counted) HN points across their site, total. Meanwhile, authors that sent a reply back had an average of 47~54 HN total.

Qualitative data

I found filling out an email to be very exciting and happiness-inducing, in ways that simply reading an article isn't. There's joy to be found in interacting with people beyond just exchanging information.

Similar to what Wouter says that Writing Is Redirecting Attention, writing emails redirects attention too! And perception as well; I felt warmer towards people I'm about to contact than towards people whose articles I read and forget.

...However, on to the part that everybody's been waiting for: the individual sites! drumrolll 🥁

🍲 This day’s portion - "Setting up a Netlify-like deployment system on LAMP stack hosting"

Found through Marginalia Explore. It seems like the website is currently "hibernating", but at the time I visited it, there were a bunch of cool articles. Something that caught my attention was the fact that the author was actively trying to stay out of Google's index.

Ultimately, I opted to contact them in relation to the linked-above article on switching from Netlify to SSH+Rsync+Nginx—which resonated with me, as I've also contemplated whether I want to stay on Netlify considering that they are VC-funded and big on AI—when I'm neither 😂

The author responded really quickly, and answered my question about whether I should be worried about DDOS hugs-of-death if I run my site off a cheap VM in detail. 10/10 would read and chat again (but alas, hibernation! 😅)

✒️ Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden - "Sanding off friction from indie web connection"

I wasn't expecting to find a sci-fi writer on Marginalia, but guess there's such people on there too! It was a pleasure getting to know Tracy's site, through the random article button it feature, and mentally smiling at the similarities to other writers' blogs I've seen around writing communities.

Yet, in contrast to other writers I've seen, Tracy is an advocate of the indie/small web! In a time where the majority of authors are instead desperately hoping to gain traction through proprietary platforms, large storefronts, or email list freebies, she writes blogposts prolifically and finds ways to engage with people in the independent, decentralized small web.

That's how I decided to contact her. I found an article which covers a similar topic as my experiment, how small web connections happen, and opted to go ahead and ask her my research question: do people contact her over email, or do they prefer other means?

Her personal experience was that emails have led to the richest conversations overall, but that she had more people start contacting her when she started linking more to other people.

...From there, we had few rather lengthy emails back and forth, since that's what happens when you ask a writer a question, they come back to you with a mini-essay. 😂

Personally, getting to know Tracy (even a scant bit) was the highlight of this experiment for me.

⌨️ quanttype - "Working from home: initial impressions"

Found via Marginalia. I found I could relate to the points the article makes about working from home; however, the part that captured my imagination the most was what the author mentioned at the very end about the need to have "coffee machines" on the internet where people meet.

I did not get a reply. However, to answer the author's question about what is the Internet equivalent to the ephemeral communication by a watercooler/coffee machine in an office, I think I have a favorite answer: IRC

🌖 theAdhocracy - "Semicircular Borders"

Again, found through Marginalia. This is the one author who did not have an email posted anywhere on their website.
Yet, I enjoyed reading through their article-tutorial on making a rounded CSS border that is half purple, half-transparent—thus, a purple semicircle. It caught my attention because of the step-by-step explanation of how they reached the final CSS, including the wrong turns along the wake—a style of explanation I realized I haven't seen much of in CSS tutorials.

I ended up asking the author whether they know of other people doing such CSS tutorials, and was blessed with a link to Piccalil, which is a great resource for all things frontend! Piccalil even have an article on print styles, which is right up the kind of CSS I am personally interested about.

🗾 James Van Dyne - "Unintended consequences of Introducing new tech into our lives"

Last site I got through Marginalia. I remember exploring James's site for a bit, before alighting on a tech article I could relate with—because so many of their article are about Japan instead!

In this particular article, James reflects on forgetting where their AirPods are, and ending up sleeping better, to come to a conclusion about how technology, while improving our lives in some ways, often comes with a range of hidden costs—including bad habits we might form regarding using that technology.

Naturally, with my personal bad habits regarding screen time (how is it 1am again! 😂), it was really easy to relate to that article. I asked a question following up on the author's personal experience, and ended up getting a reply a week or so later.

📈 Leslie Mathys - "22: Dopamine Chasing"

This article I got through PowRSS's "random" button. Quite fancy, considering how new Leslie's blog is; the article itself is part of a 30-day blogging marathon he ran—while, incidentally, starting a web design business! It's been cool watching his journey since 😊

In that particular article, however, Leslie describes his experience with shiny-object syndrome—something I later ended up also blogging about. Basically, it's far too easy to start a shiny new project, and far too hard to bring oneself to later finish it up so that it's good and presentable. I guess we have slightly different analyzes of the problem, however; I ended up attributing the problem to not making the time to care for others and for things, while Leslie attributes the problem to fear of failure. (But then again, love dispels fear (1 John 4:18), so maybe it checks out?)

I ended up drafting a long email in reply to that article, and... never got an email reply back. However! Leslie's very next day's blog post, "29: Nearing The Finish Line", contains what I think is a reference to that email, hence the uncertainty of whether it should count as a reply or not.

🕸️ Aral Balkan - "Web Numbers"

A post on the coolness of using bare IP addresses for communication, found through PowRSS.

In it, Aral describes the centralized domain name system as a major blocker to the popularization of the small web, since it's costly for people to have to pay tons of money for what's just an address they can be contacted at. As a solution, Aral suggests using IP addresses, the same way people get to use phone numbers - as a personal "web number" their friends contact them with.

All of that reminded me a lot of the GNU name system, in the way in which the GNS allows for getting rid of a centralized naming system and remembering one's friends either directly by public key (which I thought was an IP address instead -- oops) or delegating to another instance of the GNS, so I penned an email to Aral, asking if they've heard of it.
Did not get a reply.

📜 Tregeagle - "writing"

A short piece which captivated me with the story it told—again found through PowRSS.
In it, the author recounts their experience as a boy, daydreaming of spaceships (..which I also did), and having to write a story for homework. I found it rather brave—and wholesome—to share such early writing, so I penned a quick letter of encouragement. Pity the schoolteacher focused on punctuation and not on story structure! 😅 😁

🔪 As in guillotine... - "Catch-22: Thoughts on “AI” in Marketing and Inevitability"

Last site I got to through PowRSS. It took me a while to understand what the website's name means, but it's painfully obvious now, so I'll leave it to you to discover (:

I enjoyed this analysis of the "inevitability" argument in support of AI—the idea that we should all use AI because it's "inevitably" what everyone is going to start using.

My own reply to that argument is that even if it were true that AI is going to become so good as to be basically required for everyone (the way having a phone is a necessity), that's no reason to rush using the subpar AI available today—as it's a risky undertaking that might leave you stagnating in your real skills, while catching up to using an AI model would be trivial once(/if!) those become better.

Guy instead reasons that using an AI tool would prevent one from improving their skills; when that kind of daily improvement is extremely beneficial to clients (as the person you hire on day 1 is going to be much better on day 100), more than the short-term, short-sighted gains from AI-powered usage.

Best part of the article was that it comes from a marketing specialist, and not yet another programmer—so now I can point to two fields, in which specialists see the harms of AI "deskilling".

I penned an email to Guy asking if he's observed specific improvements to his own skills lately, out of curiosity, driven by an article I read once suggesting that programmers need to get better at explaining how the new things they've learned map to better outcomes for the business they work at.
Unfortunately, I never got a reply.

🔎 Roy Tang - "the web as a space to be explored"

I got to this particular article through Dominik Schwind's linkblog—but I have no idea how I got to said linkblog; perhaps through PowRSS?

Whatever the means I used to reach the webpage, I found it resonant with the ideas of the small web: a place where you follow links around to find cool new pages—and in a sense, resonant with this very article and all the other articles it highlights 😁

A summary can't do Roy's article justice—it paints such a vivid picture of the web as a place to explore; as web browsing as something to enjoy—not just for the information or entertainment one finds online, but for the mystery and excitement from discovering the writings of amazing people from all walks of live.

Excited by the prospects of the world Roy described, I penned him an email asking whether he'd think such a vision could become "mainstream"—and got a reply with a well-deserved explanation about the difficulty of defining "mainstream", especially as a fellow geek.

🧲 James O'Claire - "How to self host your own S3 in 2025"

This article I found through DuckDuckGo, about a month I had contacted the other articles' authors. I was looking for alternatives to Minio, as they had recently removed the admin interface from the open-source Minio Console, pushing it to proprietary offerings instead—this being a breach of trust.

James's article described having the exact same experience with Minio, before detailing their experience running Garage—another open-source S3 server, that I remember as being way more flexible about storage than Minio and overall much nicer to deploy.

Since I was running the whole small web contact experiment, I decided to reach out and ask James how it's been going so far for them——and found out that Garage is about as cool in practice as it is on paper—very cool! Definitely installing that if I need an S3 instance for something! 😊

Conclusion / Results

Hopefully, you are still alive after the 1.5k words wall-of-text of accidental linkblogging. Feel free to check only some of the sites I mentioned, or read the article in parts, or open everything and bookmark it for later!

Initially, when I was making the experiment, I hoped to get a much larger sample size; but I ended up getting only a few websites. However, I think that's actually good, considering the way I gradually slid into less and less relevant questions.

In terms of results, I think I can say that website owners out there enjoy getting emails, in agreement with the hypothesis. While I only got a 70% reply rate, the emails I did not get replies to were generally less relevant, more rambly, or asked way too open-ended questions. As such, I think interactions not influenced by running an experiment would have an even higher reply rate. However, my sample was small and biased, so it is possible that most people don't like getting emails for their blog articles—so more data would be needed.

Something curious in the data so far is that people with smaller, less-popular websites seem more likely to respond than people with larger, more-popular websites. At the same time, there seem to be plenty of exceptions to this rule, so, a separate experiment testing that hypothesis is needed.

A qualitative result I did not expect was how writing about other people's articles, whether in email or in an article of my own, would change the way in which I interact with those articles. It helps me appreciate them so much better!

A qualitative result I did expect, but did not end up seeing, was that this challenge would help me improve my follow-up skills, as I'm terrible at replying back to cool people I've found. But... now that it's been a few months and my inbox is a lot fuller, I think I accidentally practiced my cold-calling skills instead. Perhaps replying to everyone that I started a conversation with is the challenge I need? 😂😂

Either way, this has been my 25-th #100DaysToOffload article, and one of my longest articles to date. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you want to contact me, you can do so over email, over Mastodon, or over a range of other channels—I really do appreciate interactions with other people! 😃

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