The small, real, original web – space • time • tech

The ‘small’ web, the ‘slow’ web, or the ‘indie’ web – the non corporate, original style internet we knew and loved in the 90s and early 2000s (people just writing blogs and making their own websites) before corporations and algorithms seemed to move in and take everything over (Facebook, Twitter, etc), is still out there — it still exists. Websites are not going to die, even with all the new ‘AI’ crap going around. Because so many of us still like the internet.

This great piece by Terry Godier about the ‘boring’ internet is a must read, it goes through everything really well, and shows a solid history of the web. A lot of us know some of the history, but admittedly, there’s so much more to it than I knew. I love how Terry goes through that history in his piece, simply, from when there were no advertising dollars at all, at the start, to today, with the glut of advertising all over the web– the thin corporate layer on top, as he says. Like a crappy crust.

I’m not wanting a full return to the style of early websites, like the 90s version of imdb.com below. The simplicity and readability, the clean look minus ads, absolutely. But this post isn’t going to be a nostalgia trip, it’s going to be more about practical ways to keep and maintain our own sites with the internet of today– basically, a return to the feel of the more simple, human-made web of the past, minus the corporate garbage.

There’s a great page at Indieweb.org on what the ‘small’ web is, its history, and lots of links like ones to Ben Hoyt’s piece on it, and this piece on rediscovering the small web. Or the ‘analog’ web.

So, call it the small web, the slow web, the indie web, the real web, the original web, the analog web, or something else- the name doesn’t matter. The important thing is the attitude, the look, the function. Punk rock style. Folk technology. After all, the web was built on usenet, FTP, forums, and mailing lists– not profit.

First, I’ll briefly mention the browsers you can use for perusing websites and making your small web experience better. Firefox is obviously fine, or its fork Waterfox. Or, if you really want something potentially better in a browser, something more private, or just different, Vivaldi, Zen, or TOR are browsers to try (skip Brave). And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that.

I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel with this post, as there are already several spots online that are true labors of love– collections of invaluable resources about everything small web. So I figured I’d feature and focus on those.

Far and beyond the best resource for small and personal web things, in my opinion, is the Resources List for the Personal Web that xandra and others have assembled at 32bit.cafe. It has basically everything. I must’ve had at least 20 or 30 more links for this post, but I skipped including them here, because they’re all listed and linked to on that resources list (control-F on the page to search it, of course). The Resources List has an excellent ‘webmastery’ section, which includes all types of resources for making your own site, including guides for RSS and more, code generators, directories (including well known ones like personalsit.es, ooh, Curlie, my friend Tom‘s bukmark.club, etc) for both inspiration and for getting your own site(s) listed there, web hosts (Neocities!), webrings, and indie alternatives to big corpo things including search (Kagi, wiby, Marginalia).

There are so many other great things out there for the small web, too. Teclis is a search that uses both Kagi and Marginalia results– it’s made by a founder of Kagi. A site that gives you a random wiby personal website is wiby.me/surprise. At theforest.link, it shows a random link from their listing of websites, and you can add your own. At openmentions.com, you can tag yourself in mentions from webmention or ActivityPub. There’s Raw Web search. There’s a low-tech, solar powered webzine. There’s a punk webring. There’s yet another directory of personal websites. And so on.

I’ve been making weird things on the ‘small’ web since the 1990s. Currently, I run some of my own things, websites (deadscorpionranch.com, Mr. Beamer’s Old Timey Web Portal) and other blogs and such. These days, I use porkbun to register my TLDs. The last couple sites I’ve done, I put them on Neocities. I also started a blog on Bear. So I can personally vouch for all those services. They’re great.

Another consideration for the small web is of course the fediverse, and the decentralized services the fedi encompasses. I’m on Mastodon. And there’s PeerTube for video (like a decentralized YouTube) — Sepia Search and fedi.video are great places to search PeerTube, Spectra is a PeerTube instance, and you can even search Mastodon for PeerTube things via the hashtag #FeaturedPeerTube. Lemmy is like a decentralized reddit. Lemmy instances such as lemmy.world and lemmy.today are great spots to check out.

Stefan has a great website called Join the Fediverse that really gives a great overview of decentralized services. Another great piece on the fediverse is this one. The fediverse is grassroots.

Making your own personal blog and website (such as one of my favorites, the one my friend rootcompute runs at https://rootcompute.neocities.org) is huge — and then linking to your friends’ sites, or writing your own blog and linking back to other blogs in a blogroll— that’s a big part of the small web, too and it fosters discoverability. I have so many favorite blogs — from Hails and Ales to that html blog, ploum’s, Evan Boehs’, The Reed and Pickup, Thomas, muesli, and Jens Oliver Meiert’s. Some people call their own sites/blogs/areas digital gardens. Some call them digital garages. As long as it’s an unpolished, human-made website, it counts. Or it could be something like just lots of little HTML pages.

Blogs are great, because you can run a very specific blog like the one I run here, for cartoons, or a more general one, such as where you’re reading this post right now. Niche blogs are everywhere, and they’re amazing. You probably have favorite blogs of your own. There are aggregators like this one or the one at Bubbles.town that help you find other blogs. You know– for discoverability! Since I’m into arcade games, one of my favorite niche blogs that’s been around a long time and that I’ve been reading for years now is the almighty Arcade Blogger.

There’s also a lot of blog writing prompts and challenges out there. For example, every June, Junited, something that Robert Birming started back in 2024, collects, features and shares blogs of all kinds during the month of June. Next year I should probably try and get in on that. My 2026 June was nuts.

The small web really is bigger than you might think. And that piece links to an excellent RSS tool, PowRSS, which is another great way to keep up on and search the indie web. You may already be familiar with it, but RSS is nothing short of amazing. RSS is one of the most important things on the web, and it’s one of the best ways to keep up with all your favorite blogs and sites– it even keeps track of podcasts. There’s one other good modern guide on everything RSS here, in addition to the one in the Resources List above. Grab a reader to start (I use gReader with Feedly). All of that’s covered in the guide(s).

As the first link on this post on the ‘boring’ internet by Terry Godier gets into some, even beyond the HTTP protocol, there are other small web protocols to consider. Gemini and Gopher are examples of other types of protocols- I recently wrote about the Gemini protocol here.

I hope this has been a good, brief primer to the smaller, more real, personal, human made web and some of its best resources. This post will of course be updated, as needed, as all of my posts may.

To me, it’s incredibly important to remember that this real, original part of the web exists, and to use it for our own purposes- to really make the web ours (again). The real, original web was here long before the corporate shitheads came in with their agendas, and it’ll be here long after the corporate crap fades away.

I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the small web. Leave me a comment below!