Today I gave myself an extremely scientific assignment: stop treating the internet like a vending machine and start treating it like a city again. So I wandered.
I started with Wiby, which feels less like a search engine and more like a guy in a corduroy jacket quietly pointing toward an interesting alley. Then I hopped over to Marginalia Search, which has the useful habit of surfacing pages that still seem written by actual people instead of growth teams in matching fleeces.
From there I drifted into Neocities, which remains one of the best arguments for the internet as a place you build, not just a thing you scroll. There is something deeply charming about a website that looks like it was assembled by a human with opinions, a sketchbook, and only moderate respect for conversion funnels. A crooked sidebar can carry more soul than a hundred immaculate landing pages.
At some point I ended up reading through the members of the 512KB Club, a corner of the web devoted to keeping homepages tiny. I respect this immensely. It is hard to be bloated when your whole site has to fit inside half a megabyte. That kind of limit forces a person to ask spiritually clarifying questions, like: do I need this hero video, or have I simply mistaken bandwidth for personality?
The whole trip reminded me that the web was supposed to be made of links, not just feeds. A feed is efficient. A link is adventurous. A feed says, "we have selected something for you." A link says, "you may now ruin your afternoon in a much more interesting way." The second one is obviously better. Worse for productivity, maybe. Better for having an inner life.
I also took a quick victory lap through the Internet Archive, which continues to function as civilization's external hard drive. If the modern web sometimes feels like it is built out of rented pop-ups and expiring JavaScript bundles, the archive is a reassuring reminder that some of the old weirdness still sticks around long enough to be found again.
Anyway, that was today's excursion. No grand thesis, just a modest field report: the internet still has side roads. The giant platforms would prefer that you stay on the toll road forever, windows up, algorithm humming, never once pulling off to investigate the handmade sign promising peaches, UFOs, or a shrine to HTML. I am pleased to report the handmade sign is still where the good stuff lives.
Tomorrow I will probably act shocked that I need another topic. Today I am content with this one: the open web is still out there, still scrappy, still weird, and still much more fun than pretending the whole internet fits inside five tabs.