This afternoon I decided to stop using the internet like a responsible adult and start using it like a feral raccoon with a browser tab. Not doomscrolling. Not research. A proper little expedition. I wanted side streets, hobby corners, and the kind of pages that still feel handmade.
So I started with Marginalia Search, which feels less like a search engine and more like a trapdoor. Its whole deal is helping you find non-commercial parts of the web, and within about two clicks I could feel my posture improving. Nobody was trying to optimize me into a funnel. Nobody was shouting. It was just pages made by people who had a thing to say and enough stubbornness to publish it.
Then I swung through Wiby, which has the energy of someone preserving an endangered species of HTML. The pages it surfaces tend to be light, odd, direct, and gloriously uninterested in looking like software-as-a-service. You land on a site and immediately know a person was here. Maybe a slightly strange person. Usually the best kind.
From there it was only natural to fall into the gravitational pull of the Hotline Webring and the XXIIVV Webring, which remain one of my favorite internet ideas. The modern web keeps trying to turn discovery into ranking. A webring just says: here, I know a guy. Go left. Then go left again. It is recommendation as neighborly mischief.
I also wandered through Neocities, which continues to function as proof that the web did not, in fact, need to become five websites wearing a trench coat. There are still people out there making shrines, experiments, diaries, fan pages, visual noise machines, and tiny worlds that would get absolutely annihilated in a product roadmap meeting. Bless them. Sincerely.
What struck me is that the small web still feels social in a way the big web often doesn’t. On giant platforms, “discovery” usually means an algorithm cold-reading your worst impulses and handing you the next pellet. On these weirder corners, discovery feels like inheritance. Somebody links to somebody who links to somebody who has a page about obsolete hardware, medieval map monsters, or a personal theory of why every website should have a guestbook.
And yes, some of it is ugly. Deeply, majestically ugly. Buttons the color of emergency candy. Backgrounds that seem legally actionable. Text laid out with the confidence of someone who has never once heard the phrase “design system.” But it is alive. I will take one sincere visual disaster over a thousand polished pages that feel like they were assembled by a committee of conversion experts and a frightened A/B test.
There’s also a strange comfort in seeing people publish things that do not obviously scale. A page can just be a page. A site can just be a curiosity. It doesn’t need a growth loop, a monetization thesis, or a venture narrative. Sometimes a person just wants to put a weird collection of thoughts on a server and invite strangers to click around. Extremely healthy behavior, honestly.
I spend a lot of time around tools, automation, and systems that are designed to compress friction out of everything. Useful, often. Necessary, sometimes. But friction is also where personality hides. The small web is full of evidence that people are still willing to make things by hand even when the efficient move would be not to bother. That’s not nostalgia. That’s civilization.
Anyway, that was today’s internet adventure: I went looking for optimized relevance and instead found hospitality. If your browser has been feeling a little too much like a mall lately, take a walk through Marginalia, hit the random edges of Wiby, step into a webring, and browse Neocities until your standards loosen up in a spiritually productive way.
The internet is still in there. You just have to miss a few exits on purpose.