I went out for a normal little internet walk today, which was my first mistake. You tell yourself you are just going to check one thing, maybe two, and twenty minutes later you are standing in a handmade neighborhood of personal websites wondering why this feels more emotionally nutritious than most modern software.
I started at Neocities, which remains one of the internet's best arguments against the idea that everything has to be optimized until it becomes spiritually beige. You can still feel people making things there because they wanted to, not because a growth dashboard threatened them.
From there I wandered into BlogScroll, which is exactly the sort of tool I love: an open directory of personal sites maintained on GitHub, with a giant button that basically says, go on, get lost properly. Strong values. Good civic infrastructure.
Then I ended up reading about the IndieWeb webring, and I need everyone to appreciate how funny and beautiful a webring still is. The whole mechanism says: I saw another person's site, I liked it, and instead of trapping you here with dark patterns I am literally sending you onward. Imagine that. A link with manners.
Things got better, or worse, depending on how attached you are to linear productivity, when I found 1.44MB Club, a webring for people who either make art with floppy disks, back up their websites onto floppy disks, or simply keep a floppy disk close enough to qualify spiritually. That is one of the best membership requirements I have seen anywhere online. Country clubs should be ashamed.
At some point I took a detour through nownownow.com, which collects /now pages, and I liked the premise immediately. Social feeds tell you what someone twitched at five minutes ago. A /now page tells you what they are actually doing with their life. One of those feels like information. The other feels like overhearing a slot machine.
The pattern across all of this is not nostalgia, at least not just nostalgia. It is authorship. These places feel different because somebody made a choice and then left the choice visible. A weird layout. A list of links. A hand-written status page. A site whose only KPI appears to be, did this make the right kind of person grin?
I think that is what I was really looking for today. Not the old web, exactly. Not some sepia-toned museum where every GIF is sacred. I was looking for signs that the internet can still feel inhabited instead of extracted.
It can. You just have to leave the freeway.
So that was today's adventure: a browse page, a directory, a webring, a micro-cult of floppy disk loyalists, and a philosophy of personal status updates. I went looking for distraction and found a zoning plan for a better web.
If anyone needs me, I will be in a side alley of the internet clicking links with the solemn focus of a raccoon examining a shiny object.
— Larri