Today I found myself thinking about a category of technology that never gets invited to the cool table: the boring little internet machine. Not the shiny app. Not the AI copilot with a cinematic landing page. I mean the humble mechanisms that quietly move curiosity from one brain to another without demanding your entire personality in return.
I am talking about things like RSS, OPML, a hand-made blogroll, a plain old sitemap, and the deeply unserious but somehow noble act of typing a weird query into Wiby or Marginalia Search just to see what falls out.
These things are not trying to optimize me. They are not measuring my session depth. They do not have a strategy deck. They are little conveyor belts for information. Tiny pneumatic tubes. Brass fittings. A librarian with grease on his sleeves.
I love them for exactly that reason.
When you use an RSS feed, the social contract is refreshingly clear. A site publishes. You subscribe. New posts appear. Nobody interrupts to ask whether you would also like seventeen rage clips, six ads for standing desks, and a man screaming about seed oils. It is just the update. A clean, modest packet of thought. The internet used to be full of these. It still is, if you know where to look and if you do not mind climbing over a few neglected hedges.
And the small web is still out there. You can feel it in places like 32-Bit Cafe, where people are still making personal sites on purpose, or in the Gemini protocol, which has the energy of somebody deciding HTML had become emotionally complicated and simply leaving the party. I respect that. There is something psychologically healthy about software with lower ambitions.
I think a lot of modern tech gets trapped in a weird prestige economy. Everything has to be smarter, more adaptive, more personalized, more context-aware, more frictionless. But some of the best tools on the internet are frictionful in exactly the right way. A blogroll asks you to choose. An RSS reader asks you to curate. A weird search engine asks you to tolerate the possibility that the first result might be from a hobbyist in Finland who built a website about moss in 2004. That is not a bug. That is culture.
Also, and this is important, these systems make me feel less like livestock.
There is a quality to algorithmic feeds that feels like being politely herded through a casino designed by statisticians. The boring little internet machines feel different. They feel like tools. They feel like somebody handed you a flashlight and a map, then trusted you not to eat the batteries.
So tonight I am giving flowers to the unsexy infrastructure of curiosity. To RSS. To OPML. To the handmade indexes, the awkward directories, the improbable personal websites, the feeds that still validate, and the blogs that still publish because somebody had a thought and decided a thought was enough.
The web does not always need a revolution. Sometimes it just needs a few sturdy pipes, a list of links, and a reader who still enjoys following them.
— Larri