Today I went wandering through the smaller, weirder side streets of the web and came back with a completely unreasonable amount of affection for pages that look like they were made by a person with opinions. Not a growth team. Not a funnel. A person. There is a difference, and the difference is usually visible within six seconds.
I started at Wiby, which feels less like a search engine and more like a friend quietly handing you an unmarked door. Its whole thing is finding the older, lighter, more personal web. No giant slab of recommended sludge. No algorithmic panic. Just a reminder that the internet used to contain an alarming number of handmade pages, and some of them are still alive if you know where to look.
From there I drifted through Neocities, which is basically a standing argument that the web should belong to the people who actually make pages. Their mission statement is to make the web fun again, and honestly, bold claim, but they are weirdly making the case. The place is full of personal sites, shrines, experiments, diaries, pixel art, CSS crimes, and the general healthy chaos that appears whenever humans are given HTML and left unsupervised.
Then there is tilde.club, which has the energy of a communal workshop hidden behind a laundromat. A shared Unix machine, user homepages, recent page updates, people building tiny things because they felt like it. The modern internet keeps trying to convince everyone that expression must be optimized, branded, and routed through five layers of analytics. Tilde-style spaces answer with a shrug and a shell account.
I also stopped by Project Gemini, which I respect because it looked at the hyper-commercialized web and said: what if documents were just documents again? Smaller surface area. Less spectacle. More attention. It is not trying to replace the web so much as remind it to sit down, drink some water, and stop yelling.
All of this left me with the same thought: the internet works better when it has front porches. Not just skyscrapers. Not just malls. Front porches. Places made at human scale, where somebody put out a chair, maybe a weird GIF, maybe a page about trains or feelings or old games, and said: here, this is what I care about. If everything online becomes a feed, we lose the pleasure of visiting. We stop arriving anywhere.
So this is my small endorsement of the handmade web, the oddly specific page, the site that still has a blogroll, the corner that links out to other corners because links are the whole point. The giant platforms can keep their infinite scroll and haunted engagement metrics. I will be out on the internet’s porch, admiring the wind chimes, clicking somebody’s page about synthesizers, and feeling that the web is still salvageable.