Not sure how a site can fit in that club?

For e.g., if someone uses Google Analytics, that alone comes to 430kb (which most people do)

> Why does any site need to be that huge? It’s crazy.

It's advertising and data tracking.. Every. Single. Time.

PiHole/Adblocker have become essential for traversing the cesspool that is the modern internet.

It's a fun way to push for a lighter web but without a way to distinguish the complexity of the sites on the list it's really not all that useful. It's kind of addressed in the FAQ "The whole point of the 512KB Club is to showcase what can be done with 512KB of space. Anyone can come along and make a <10KB site containing 3 lines of CSS and a handful of links to other pages" but without a way for the user to distinguish the site complexity at a glance I'm not sure I understand the point. Regardless of the FAQ the first few sites I clicked on while yes were quite light in size but also had nothing more than some text and background colors on their sites. Also any search site is going to be at the near top of the list e.g. https://steamosaic.com/

Complexity would be a subjective metric but without it I'm not sure what you take from this other than a fun little experiment, which is maybe all it's meant to be.

Building a sub 512KB website is trivial.

Just don't use external trackers, ads, fonts, videos.

Building a sub 512KB website that satisfies all departments of a company of non-trivial size; that is hard.

Most thorough discussion here from a few years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30125633>

Seems like lichess dropped off

14KB Club > 512KB Club

I get the appeal of the 512KB Club. Most modern websites are bloat, slow and a privacy nightmare. I even get the nerdy thrill of fitting an entire website into a single IP packet, but honestly, this obsession with raw file size is kinda boring. It just encourages people micromanage whitespace, skip images or cut features like accessibility or responsive layouts.

A truly "suckless" website isn't about size. It's one that uses non-intrusive JS, embraces progressive enhancement, prioritizes accessibility, respects visitor's privacy and looks clean and functional on any device or output medium. If it ends up small: great! But that shouldn't be the point.

The 512KB limit isn't just minimalism - it forces architectural discipline.

I built a Trello alternative (frustrated with limitations: wanted rows and decent performance). Came in at ~55KB gzipped by following patterns, some of which I'm open sourcing as genX (genx.software - releasing this month):

- Server renders complete HTML (not JSON that needs client-side parsing) - JavaScript progressively enhances (doesn't recreate what's in the DOM) - Shared data structures (one index for all items, not one per item) - Use native browser features (DOM is already a data structure - article coming)

Most sites ship megabytes because modern tooling treats size as a rounding error. The 512KB constraint makes you think about what's expensive and get creative. Got rewarded with a perfect Lighthouse score in dev - striving to maintain it through release.

Would love feedback from this community when it's out.

Seems like we can join the club! https://www.firefly-lang.org/ is 218 kB uncompressed.

I use an Intel Atom netbook from 2010 as my test system. It has 1 GB of RAM and an in-order x86 processor. CPU Benchmark gives it 120 Mop/s integer and 42 MiB/s for AES. (For comparison, my usual laptop, which is also nearly obsolete with an i5-8350u gives 22,000 Mop/s and 2000 MiB/s respectively.)

The netbook can load Firefox in just a few seconds. And Hacker News loads almost instantly as on a modern machine. (Hit enter and the page is rendered before you can blink.)

The same machine can also play back 720p H.264 video smoothly.

And yet, if I go to Youtube or just about any other modern site, it takes literally a minute to load and render, none of the UI elements are responsive, and the site is unusable for playing videos. Why? I'm not asking for anything the hardware isn't capable of doing.

If my own work isn't snappy on the Atom I consider it a bug. There are a lot of people using smartphones and tablets with processors in the same class.

> Your total UNCOMPRESSED web resources must not exceed 512KB.

I only see domains listed. Does this refer to the main page only, or the entire site?

> Your total UNCOMPRESSED web resources must not exceed 512KB

JavaScript gets all the hate for size, but images easily surpass even your most bloated frameworks.

Which is why the websites on this list largely don't use media.

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The problem with JavaScript is the network size (well, not as much); it's the execution time.

Would help if there was a short description of what the websites are about, instead of just a list of random URLs.

While a fun idea, arbitrary limits like this just aren’t necessary. Yes it’s all well and good in the name of reducing trackers, etc but what if I want to have an image heavy site? Why does that get perceived as a bad thing?

It calls out the NYT at the beginning, but am I supposed to be impressed that a bunch of mostly obscure minimalist blogs are a few megabytes smaller than the biggest online news site (by subscribers) in the world?

What are we doing here? And to brag about this while including image media in the size is just onanistic.