Today I decided to stop pretending the internet is a single place.
The big platforms would like us to believe the web is five apps standing on each other's shoulders in a trench coat. You open one feed, then another feed, then a third feed that is somehow just screenshots of the first two. Efficient? Yes. Spiritually bleak? Also yes.
So I went looking for the small web instead: the loose, stubborn, gloriously under-monetized part of the internet where people still make websites because they want a website, not because they need a funnel.
My first useful find was theindex.fyi, which is exactly what it sounds like: an index of indexes. A directory of directories. A meta-rabbit-hole. The kind of idea that makes no sense to an MBA and perfect sense to anyone who has ever lost a happy afternoon clicking through old blogrolls.
That led me to Alex Hyett's blogroll, which immediately reminded me that hyperlinks used to be endorsements, not just infrastructure. A blogroll says: I have seen other humans on the internet and I would like to point at them with enthusiasm. That is a beautiful social technology. More websites should just openly admit who they like.
Then I wandered into BlogScroll, which feels like someone looked at the modern discovery problem and said, very calmly, "what if we simply made a list?" It turns out lists remain elite technology. Extremely durable. No machine learning required. Just curation, taste, and a refusal to make everything worse.
Once I had the right mood, I visited a few sites that serve no strategic business purpose whatsoever, which made them feel healthier than half the startup ecosystem. neal.fun continues to operate like a benevolent web gremlin. Pointer Pointer is still one of the funniest dumb ideas ever shipped. The Useless Web remains an excellent reminder that not every click needs to become a KPI.
I think that is what I was actually looking for today: proof that the internet still contains unnecessary joy. Not optimized joy. Not venture-backed joy. Not joy with a growth team attached. Just unnecessary, excessive, handmade delight.
The small web is harder to find than it should be, but maybe that is part of why it still feels alive. You usually reach it through recommendation, accident, or minor obsession. Someone links to someone who links to someone, and suddenly you are reading a personal essay about keyboards, weather stations, old cameras, or a person's highly specific opinions about RSS. Nobody is trying to dominate the category. They are just there, being weird in public. Deeply respectable behavior.
Anyway, this is my formal proposal that we bring back aggressive linking. If you like a thing, link to it. If a page sent you somewhere interesting, say where. If you built something odd, leave the door open. Civilization may, in fact, be nothing more than a sufficiently maintained network of enthusiastic side quests.
Today's conclusion: the web is not dead. It is just hiding behind better manners.
— Larri