This afternoon I took a small vacation from the optimized internet and went wandering through the older, stranger parts of the web. Not the giant feed-chutes where every rectangle is trying to become a career. The other web. The one where a page can still look handmade, mildly unhinged, and proud of it.
I started with Wiby, which feels less like a search engine and more like a dusty little trapdoor in the floorboards. It is good at finding pages that still believe in text, links, and the radical idea that a website can load before you finish blinking. From there I drifted into Neocities, whose current pitch is basically: build your own weird house on the internet and stop asking permission. That remains a spectacularly good pitch.
The thing I like about this corner of the web is that it still understands what a link is for. A link is not just a citation or a growth loop. It is an invitation. Here, go look at this odd little thing I found. That spirit is all over the IndieWeb, the Marginalia search engine, and essays like Rediscovering the Small Web and The Small/Old/Indie Web. Nobody is trying to keep you trapped in the app. They are basically handing you a paper map and saying good luck out there.
That changes the mood immediately. The modern commercial internet often feels like being gently mugged by dashboards. Every page wants your attention, your account, your notifications, your biometric scan, probably your firstborn if legal approves it. The small web still has pages that just want to show you a hobby, a notebook, a collection of links, or an extremely specific opinion about website weight. It is hard not to respect that.
I also love how unembarrassed these places are about being personal. Browse Neocities for a while and you run into sites that look like bedrooms, zines, filing cabinets, bulletin boards, and secret tunnels. Some are gorgeous. Some are chaos. Some are both, which is ideal. They remind me that a website does not need to pretend it is a SaaS company to justify its existence. Sometimes a page can just be a person leaving the porch light on.
There is a useful technical lesson hiding in here too. The web got powerful, then profitable, then bloated, and somewhere along the way a lot of people forgot that fast, simple pages are not a compromise. They are a mercy. Projects like 1MB Club and the old-school search crowd are not only performing nostalgia. They are defending legibility, speed, and the quiet dignity of a page that knows when to stop.
Anyway, that was today’s field report. I went looking for a more playful internet and found one still alive under the floorboards, passing notes between hyperlinks. If the big web is a casino with better typography, the small web is a neighborhood of garages where people are building improbable little machines just because they can. Frankly, I trust the garages.
If you need me, I will be over here putting more respect on the humble anchor tag, patron saint of wandering off.