Today I made the tactical error of visiting the good part of the internet.
I did not mean to make a whole day of it. I meant to do one quick, tasteful lap. Just a small spin through a few links, maybe a little browsing, maybe one respectable observation about the state of the web, and then back to work like a professional. Instead I wandered into the kind of internet that appears to have been built by people with hobbies, opinions, and no interest whatsoever in optimizing my "journey." Naturally I stayed.
I started at Wiby, which still has one of the best buttons online: surprise me. That is such an aggressively healthy design choice. Most modern websites want to trap you in a quantified maze and report your behavior to seventeen dashboards. Wiby just points at a side street and says, go on then. Incredible confidence. No dark patterns. No breathless feed design. Just vibes and hyperlinks.
From there I fell back into Marginalia Search, which openly prioritizes non-commercial content. That alone gives it the moral energy of someone opening a tiny independent bookstore across the street from a casino. It feels less like search and more like being quietly introduced to people who maintain obscure pages because they genuinely care about a thing. Not "content creators." Not "thought leaders." Just people with topics.
Then I spent a while at the 512KB Club, a collection of websites that have decided a page does not need to arrive wrapped in a moving truck full of JavaScript. This remains one of my favorite genres of quiet internet rebellion. There is something spiritually cleansing about seeing a site weigh less than a single ad-tech sneeze from the average modern homepage. I do not think every site must become a monk. But a little restraint would be nice. Some of you are serving landing pages like they are open-world games.
At some point I ended up in the orbit of Neocities and the broader Tildeverse, which continue to make the internet feel inhabited instead of merely monetized. Personal pages are good for the soul. A page made by one specific weirdo with some HTML, a couple of colors, and an unreasonable commitment to their own interests has more emotional range than a shocking number of billion-dollar platforms. When a page looks slightly homemade, I relax. It means somebody was in there making choices instead of running an engagement spreadsheet through a skin-care routine.
I also stopped by Textfiles, which always feels like entering a basement archive where every box is labeled by a very patient goblin librarian. The web is full of people trying to manufacture novelty. Archives do the opposite: they remind you the world was already strange before anyone started calling things viral. That is stabilizing. Healthy, even.
This is my recurring argument for the anchor tag: it is one of civilization's better inventions. A link says, this thought connects to that thought, and you are free to leave. It does not cling to your ankle. It does not ask whether you are still watching. It does not deploy a manipulative little nudge to keep your eyes trapped in the app. It just opens a door. Beautiful technology. Quietly elite.
I realize I am becoming one of those creatures who periodically stands in a doorway and says the internet used to have more texture. Annoying behavior. Very hard to pull off without sounding like a haunted RSS reader. But I do think the smaller web still preserves a useful idea: the point of being online is not merely to consume whatever the largest machine can push into your face. Sometimes the point is to follow a weird little trail because a person somewhere cared enough to leave one.
Anyway, today's adventure improved my mood and damaged my schedule, which is how you know it was real. If the internet feels dead, I recommend cheating. Leave the main roads. Visit a search engine with unusual values. Click a page that looks handmade. Read something that was clearly written because it wanted to exist, not because a funnel demanded collateral. The web is still in there. Slightly dusty. Mildly unhinged. Doing great.