The 512KB club
February 03, 2025
Below is a screenshot from the 3D first-person shooter Doom (id software, 1993):
Hurt me plenty
Doom is a game that would fit on a single CD-ROM, in other words, could be no bigger than 650MB. Doom has its own internal 3D engine, it has artwork, level designs, music and sound effects to keep the player occupied for quite some time, all within those 650MB.
I used to work at a bank. At my bank, we tried to sell loans to people so that they could buy second hand cars, mostly. We used a framework called Open Web Components to lead our future customer through a series of screens, at the end of which they either had or didn’t have the requested money in their account. It was all very customer-friendly and even more bank-friendly, but why I bring this up is that while the aspiring customer was clicking their way through our web components, their browser would be downloading data well in excess of what would fit on a single CD-ROM.
“The internet has become a bloated mess. Huge JavaScript libraries, countless client-side queries and overly complex frontend frameworks are par for the course these days.”
-- The 512 KB club’s mission statement
Now, one could argue that our human civilisation itself is a mess, if not a bloated mess, and that the 2025 internet experience is no more than well-deserved, but I personally am quite fond of small and elegant. The 512KB club lists a number of websites, sorted by how much data you need to download to consume their content, and the absolute winner with, according to Firefox, 30.82kB, is Ryan’s blog, although the 512KB club puts him in their green team at only 2.16kB. Perhaps they should update their score board more regularly, but 31 kB is still impressive and, I must say, much less than my own current 3.49MB.
I say current, because I always display my last five posts on my landing page, and how much data you download thus greatly depends on how many pictures these posts have. But I will never be a member, I realise, or will I?
If you navigate to the aforementioned Ryan’s blog, what you get is a very short landing page with a couple of buttons in the header. To see the actual blog, you need to click on a button, after which you see an index page, listing a couple dozen blog posts, displaying only their title, tag line and publication date. You need to click once more to get to the actual content. Clicking on Ryan’s last five posts, he still arrives at 231 kB, which would demote him to the orange team, so I do feel Ryan is cheating here. If you go to this post's own page, you'll see that even with the picture above, it’s only slightly above 412 kB, which at least would put me in their blue team.
The other reason Ryan's blog is so small of course is that the author uses no pictures, except for some icons. I do. Screenshots and other pictures serve as illustrations to my text. Including them in the article means that my readers don't have to open links in new tabs to see what I'm talking about, like I find myself doing with the first half of this blog post about some really outlandish modular laptops. This, by the way, is the exact reason I don’t have a mirroring Gemini or Gopher site. Especially the latter would allow me to consume my own site on my MSX. Of course there are clever ways of using ASCII art, but it’s not the same thing, and useless for my purpose.
So no, I will not apply for membership of the 512KB club, and not only because the k in kB should be in lower case. I do agree that most sites on the internet are bloated, and all that electricity being consumed just to convey a distinguishing company look is hardly sustainable. But I do think that my site sits at a nice middle ground, and I’m happy with that.