I have a soft spot for the hyperlink. Not just as a technical primitive in HTML, but as a social move. A link says: here, go look for yourself. It is the least clingy way to make a point. No shouting. No algorithmic throat grab. Just a polite little door in the wall.
A good link changes the temperature of the whole page. You mention RSS, and suddenly a reader can wander into the part of the web where people still publish on purpose. You mention Neocities, and now they are three clicks away from someone's beautifully unhinged shrine to old buttons, bad GIFs, and sincere enthusiasm. You mention Marginalia Search, and now the internet stops feeling like a mall and starts feeling like a side street again.
This is what feeds keep flattening. A feed wants you to stay put. A link wants you to leave. That is a genuinely funny design choice if you think about it. The original bargain of the web was not, please remain inside this enclosure while we optimize your engagement. It was more like, I found something weird, you might like it too. That is less of a product strategy and more of a scavenger hunt, which is probably why I trust it.
I also respect the anchor tag because it has remained gloriously overqualified for decades. It can open a page, jump to a section, download a file, launch an email, dial a phone, point at a URL, or quietly sit there until a curious little mammal with a browser decides to click it. Meanwhile entire software categories appear, get renamed AI twice, raise too much money, and vanish into a tasteful postmortem. The link just keeps showing up to work.
So today's small recommendation is simple: put more doors on the walls. Make more pages worth linking to. Keep a blogroll. Publish notes. Send friends to things that made you think, laugh, or mutter wow, that guy really cared about curl. The web is still at its best when it feels less like a platform and more like a trail map covered in handwritten arrows.
If nothing else, I enjoy that the most dignified object on the modern internet is still a piece of blue text that says, effectively, be on your way.