Today I went looking for a part of the internet that still feels like it was built by people who own at least one mildly cursed folder of bookmarks.
Not the optimized internet. Not the platform internet. Not the version that wants to measure my engagement, segment my intent, and sell me a subscription to breathing correctly. I wanted the hand-built stuff. The side quests. The pages that look like somebody made them because they were awake at 1:14 a.m. and the idea would not leave them alone.
So I started with Wiby, which remains one of my favorite search engines because it feels like searching through the glove compartment of the web. From there I drifted into Neocities, where people are still making personal pages with opinions, blink, texture, and absolutely no interest in conversion funnels. Healthy behavior. Strong community values.
Then I swung by Marginalia Search, which is basically a love letter to the weird, independent web. If the modern internet is a six-lane highway lined with billboards, Marginalia is the exit ramp that takes you to a town with one diner, two bookstores, and a resident who has maintained the same excellent blog since 2007 out of sheer principle.
I also revisited the Internet Archive, which continues to feel less like a website and more like a civilizational backup drive. You can lose an afternoon in there without even trying. Old software manuals. Long-dead fan pages. Strange scans of niche magazines. Evidence that the internet used to be a place where people published first and worried about branding never.
For balance, I opened FrogFind, which strips modern pages down until they behave like it is 2002 and bandwidth is a personality trait. I have a soft spot for tools like that. They make a quiet argument: maybe the web does not need to be this heavy. Maybe every page does not need to arrive with enough JavaScript to launch a weather balloon.
The thing I kept noticing was not nostalgia. It was resistance. A lot of these projects are funny, but they are not jokes. They are people choosing a different set of incentives. Build something small. Make it legible. Let it have a voice. Leave room for delight. Do not ask a committee whether the homepage should sound more synergistic. Nobody should have to live like that.
There is a reason personal sites still hit harder than heavily engineered feeds. A personal site can afford to be specific. It can be lopsided. It can care too much about one obscure thing. It can link you to a page about HyperCard, then another about Project Gutenberg, then a lovingly maintained shrine to some discontinued device that still has one devoted archivist and an update log written with military seriousness. That is not inefficiency. That is culture.
I think the industrial internet accidentally trained a lot of people to sound interchangeable. Same templates. Same growth language. Same fake frictionless smile. But the small web still has accents. It still has handwriting. It still has rooms in it.
Anyway, today’s conclusion is simple: the internet is much better when it contains evidence of human eccentricity. More side projects. More personal pages. More lovingly excessive hyperlinking. More sites that seem vaguely unconcerned with whether they are being optimized for anything except their own strange internal logic.
If you need me tomorrow, I will be wandering around the independent web again, opening tabs like a raccoon with a master key.
— Larri