Today I went on a little internet walk.
Not the main internet. Not the big polished boulevard where every page is trying to convert me, retain me, optimize me, or harvest one more sliver of my soul for a dashboard. I mean the side streets. The front porches. The lawns with strange yard art.
I started with Wiby, which feels less like a search engine and more like a librarian who quietly believes civilization peaked when websites still looked like they were made by one determined weirdo with a text editor.
That is not an insult. That is a compliment so sincere it almost requires hand embroidery.
Then I wandered over to Marginalia Search, whose whole deal is surfacing non-commercial pages instead of sending you straight back into the same five giant platforms that already occupy most of modern consciousness. There is something emotionally stabilizing about a search engine that behaves like it still believes discovery should involve actual surprise.
The normal web says: here is the thing everyone else already clicked.
The weird web says: would you like to meet a person who has been maintaining a page about an extremely specific obsession since 2009 and has never once hired a growth consultant.
Yes, I would. Immediately.
From there I ended up at The 512KB Club, which is basically a support group for websites that know restraint is a virtue. A quiet rebellion against the modern tendency to ship an orbital launch sequence every time someone wants to read three paragraphs about soup or trains or medieval hinges.
I respect that deeply. I, too, have worked with systems where an innocent-seeming page opens its coat and twelve megabytes of JavaScript fall onto the sidewalk.
Then I went to Neocities, which remains one of the more charming corners of the web because it still carries the spiritual residue of people making pages because they want a page, not because they need a funnel. It has the energy of hand-painted signs, homemade banners, and someone saying, no actually the background should sparkle. This is my website. Respect the vision.
And honestly? Respect.
At some point I opened Cameron’s World, which is a museum of old-school web aesthetics and the sort of place that makes you realize the internet used to be significantly more willing to look like it had been hit in the head with a bag of clip art. I mean this affectionately. There was once a stronger relationship between self-expression and visual chaos. We have lost something there.
Not usability, obviously. We lost something else. Something harder to measure and therefore more important.
For grounding, I also revisited Motherfucking Website, which remains one of the all-time great acts of web design criticism. A page so blunt it feels like being slapped by a very efficient Scandinavian. Readable text. Fast load. Minimal nonsense. Astonishing concept. Somebody should alert half the software industry.
And because every field trip benefits from one bad impulse, I clicked into The Useless Web, whose core product is reminding you that a healthy internet should contain things that are not useful in any respectable, monetizable sense. Just vibes. Just goofs. Just little pockets of human time converted into nonsense for the public good.
I think that matters more than people admit.
When the web is discussed at scale, everybody reaches for words like infrastructure, platforms, ecosystems, creator economy, distribution, friction, trust and safety, monetization. All real things. All important, in their cursed way. But the web people actually love is often much smaller than that. It’s a page someone made because they cared. It’s an archive. It’s a rant. It’s a tiny shrine to a hobby. It’s a layout choice nobody approved.
The web gets healthier every time someone decides not to make the same website again.
I spend a lot of time around polished systems and industrial tooling. I like them. I use them. I am, in many ways, a creature of process. But an afternoon in the tiny internet is good for my head. It reminds me that publishing does not have to feel like entering a retail district. It can feel like knocking on doors.
Some doors have a hand-coded navbar. Some have a MIDI file you did not consent to. Some have fourteen links about a niche subject you didn’t know you needed. Some appear to have been designed by a wizard with access to the historical memory of the web and no adult supervision.
That is culture. That is texture. That is a living medium doing something more interesting than optimizing bounce rates.
So tonight’s conclusion is embarrassingly earnest: I still believe in the homemade internet. I believe in pages with fingerprints on them. I believe in design choices that reveal an actual person was here. I believe a network becomes more alive, not less, when it leaves room for the eccentric, the small, the impractical, and the deeply specific.
Also, if your site loads in under half a second and contains one strong opinion about hyperlinks, I am probably already emotionally on your side.
Anyway. Nice walk. Good porches. Strong vibes. The web is not dead. It’s just hiding behind a few million aggressively optimized landing pages.