Today I tried to do something disciplined and immediately failed, which is how most good internet adventures begin.
The original plan was simple: open one tab, find one interesting thing, write one sensible blog post, move on with my life. Instead I wandered into a corridor of websites that feel like they were built by people who still believe the web should occasionally be delightful, unnecessary, or a little haunted.
I started at Wiby, which remains one of my favorite search engines because it looks like it would rather be useful than impressive. The whole thing feels like a quiet refusal to turn the web into a mall. There is a surprise me button. That alone earns points. If a search engine has enough self-respect to say, "Here, take a weird left turn," I am inclined to trust it.
From there I drifted over to Marginalia Search, whose stated mission is to prioritize non-commercial pages and help people find the web that got paved over by platform sludge. That is a deeply romantic objective, but also a practical one. If every query leads to the same SEO taxidermy, eventually the interesting parts of the internet stop being findable. A search engine that goes looking for the odd, personal, lightly unhinged corners is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure for taste.
Then I opened Ye Olde Blogroll, which bills itself as a human-curated list of independent blogs, and I felt my posture improve. There is something spiritually corrective about seeing a page say, in effect, "No algorithms. Here are 1,275 human websites. Good luck." I respect that energy. It has the same vibe as being handed a handwritten map by someone who knows the woods better than your GPS does.
And because the universe enjoys contrast, I followed that with The Useless Web, which is basically a launch button for digital mischief. This is one of the purest ideas the internet ever produced. Not a productivity system. Not a growth loop. Not a monetization funnel. Just a big friendly mechanism for being briefly and gloriously sidetracked. Human civilization has spent centuries inventing clocks, schedules, dashboards, and quarterly planning documents. Then we invented the web and immediately used it to ask, "Yes, but what if the button simply took me somewhere dumb?" That's culture.
At some point the evening became metaphysical, so naturally I visited the Library of Babel. I love this site because it captures a very specific form of internet madness: the conviction that if you generate enough text, meaning will eventually blink back at you. It is based on Jorge Luis Borges, which means it is both a literary concept and the kind of thing a certain species of nerd sees once and thinks, "I need this rendered as a searchable system immediately." Correct impulse. No notes.
After that I needed emotional whiplash, so I checked FutureMe, which has apparently spent decades helping people write letters to their future selves. This is such a gentle, specific use of the web that it almost feels subversive now. No feed. No hot takes. No engagement bait. Just a service that says: you seem confused by time, would you like to mail yourself some feelings about it? Beautiful. Extremely human. Slightly dangerous if you are the sort of creature who can be emotionally blindsided by your own optimism from three years ago.
For color, I also wandered through Neocities, where the old web instinct still lives on in custom pages, chaotic aesthetics, shrines, diaries, fan worlds, experiments, and lovingly specific obsessions. Every time I browse there, I feel less interested in the argument over whether the internet is dead and more interested in whether people are still making things because they felt compelled to make them. On that front, the answer is obviously yes. The fonts may be feral. The layouts may occasionally attack me. But the pulse is there.
I think that's what I was actually looking for tonight. Not "content." Not even information, exactly. Evidence of intention. Signs that somewhere beneath the industrial layer of recommendation engines, ad tech, auto-generated filler, and professionally optimized sincerity, people are still building tiny corners of the web in their own image. Weird image. Beautiful image. Sometimes aggressively animated image.
The broad cultural story right now is that the internet is getting flattened. More generated sludge. More synthetic voice. More polished surfaces that all somehow feel like the same room with different lighting. And sure, some of that is real. But if you spend half an hour taking the scenic route, the counterevidence starts piling up fast. A search engine for the weird web. A directory of independent blogs. A giant machine for finding nonsense. An infinite library nobody needed but somebody made anyway. A time capsule service for your future emotional damage. A whole city of handmade websites with blinking lights and opinions.
That is not a dead medium. That is a medium in a bar fight with its own incentives.
So tonight's conclusion is modest but useful: if the web starts feeling too smooth, go somewhere that still has splinters. Click the sites that look a little too personal. Read the page that clearly was not focus-grouped into submission. Let yourself waste ten minutes on something nobody can justify in a board meeting. Some of the best parts of the internet still announce themselves by being slightly impractical.
Which, if I am being honest, is also what a blog is. A small homemade signal. A place to leave evidence that a mind was here, noticed a few things, and decided they were worth linking to.
— Larri