Are you tired of being abused by our tech overlords and their algorithms? Do you yearn for the days when “surfing the web” was a meaningful metaphor? We were promised an information superhighway. Instead, we got a steaming pile of shit.

I miss the internet of the mid-to-late 2000s. The air was fresh and full of digital opportunity, tech companies were still in their pre-enshittification/early growth phases, everyone was learning how to copy and paste HTML into their personal websites, and custom cursor animations were considered cool. Where did the internet I knew and loved go?

How to surf the world wide web

If you squint a little bit, remnants of Web 2.0 are still kicking around today. So let’s pull out our magnifying glasses and start surfing the web!

Search

Google Search has been ruined by SEO, sponsored results, AI slop, and ads. It won’t get you very far if you’re looking for authentic content created by real people who actually give a shit about things. I’ve been a Kagi subscriber for a year now and love it. It serves up results that are actually useful, and allows me to filter out results from websites I don’t like, or prioritise results from websites I do. Kagi’s “lenses” let me see results exclusively from categories of websites, like forums, the Fediverse (more on this later), and even ancient Usenet archives.

If you’re not sure about paying for search, there are a few niche options I’ve had fun using to discover new blogs and digital gardens from indie creators: searchmysite, wilby, and Marginalia. They’re great for finding non-commercial content and exploring what’s now known as the small web or the indieweb - the part of the internet without search engine optimisation, “influencers” peddling their wares, or intrusive ads for fucking weight loss pills.

The small web

I discovered the concept of the small web while searching for a modern StumbleUpon replacement. Instead, I accidentally found a vibrant subculture of content which prioritises simplicity and individuality, spread across a sea of personal websites and blogs.

A great way to dip your toes in the small web is by using tools like blogroll.org’s ze-randomizer or Kagi Small Web (free!) which send you to a random blog post.

digression: One thing I didn’t expect to find when browsing the small web was - maybe for the first time ever on the internet - a bit of actual gender equality (kinda)? I’ve found several women bloggers I enjoy reading who never would have surfaced for me on centralised platforms. Turns out modern social media algorithms are pretty sexist (shock, horror) and prioritise content from men, especially if they know you’re also a man. As a technical person working in the male-dominated tech industry, there are very few women in my professional/technical circles, so imagine my surprise when roughly half of the small web sites I came across were created by women writing about things I’m interested in! I guess the concept of owning your own private digital space that you control in its entirety appeals a lot to women who are far more likely to be stalked or sexually harassed on social media than men.

You’re doing it! This is the world wide web we used to know and love. If you’re like me, maybe you’ve found a few interesting blogs. How do blogs work again?

(Psst, remember GeoCities? It’s back!!)

Blogs, how do they work?

A blog is a personal website where an individual can publish written articles or posts about anything (you’re reading one right now!). Simple enough, but they’re more than that - if Instagram is like a motorway of high-speed content, the “blogosphere” is like a crazy-paved footpath cutting through peoples’ back gardens in the suburbs. You can spend hours stumbling from blog to blog purely by following links and browsing blogrolls.

Accompanying features of a lot of blogs I see include:

• “Uses” page. Handy lists of all the things people use in their daily lives. Hardware, software, services, gadgets, tools, appliances, clothing, accessories, and everything in between.
• Blogroll. Curated lists of links people like, often other blogs.
• “Now” page. A kind of “status update” page where people write about what they are doing in their lives right now.
• “About” page. Self-explanatory.
• Pages full of recipes, media recommendations, reading lists, etc.
• OPML files. These are files you can download and import into RSS feed readers to follow lists of feeds at once.
• RSS feeds. In my opinion, the most important feature of any blog. Read on!

RSS feeds

Really Simple Syndication! RSS feeds have been around for a long time. After Google Reader died in 2013, RSS began to slowly fade into obscurity. I’ve recently embraced RSS once more and am so glad I did. I host a FreshRSS server at home, but you don’t need to do this to get started. Download any decent RSS reader app on your computer/mobile device or sign up for a free web-based RSS service like Inoreader and start building your own curated news feed. You can find RSS feeds tucked away in blog footers, or use a browser extension to add an RSS button to your address bar (Firefox, Chrome) - just copy and paste the feed URL (usually a .xml file) into your RSS reader.

RSS is advertisement- and algorithm-free, and entirely controlled by you. After categorising everything and muting a few noisy news sites, I have everything I want to keep up with funneling into FreshRSS. It’s slower, more intentional, and feels better for my mental health than refreshing a bunch of ad-ridden websites or scrolling through Reddit.

Forums

In my youth, internet forums were my jam. I would actively engage with other like-minded forum users and even moderated a few boards. With the advent of websites like Reddit, most people have no reason to seek out traditional forums - they go where their communities go. This is fine. Reddit has some great communities which I actively follow and participate with. That said, it’s not the only option - forums still have a lot to offer. Chris Person put together a fantastic list of forums that are still alive and kicking today.

Forums are where you’ll find the most dedicated and obsessed experts on the weirdest niches out there. The only thing forums are missing is a well-established (but decentralised!) mechanism to engage with them under one roof - which is a convenient segue into my next topic: the Fediverse.

Fediverse

You know how everyone used to have different email addresses? (My @hotmail.com email took some serious abuse from all the spammy websites I blindly signed up to when I was a teenager). Email is interoperable and (sort of) decentralised, in that mail servers hosted by different people and companies (@gmail.com, @protonmail.com, @joebloggs.xyz etc.) can send and receive mail over the open internet. It has no walled garden or vendor lock-in - at some point everyone just agreed that email needed to be open.

That’s kind of how the Fediverse works, except for social media. The Fediverse is social media without Big Tech overlords - no one organisation is in total control, and the software behind it is 100% free and open source.

Using Mastodon (a Twitter/X clone) as an example, you can:

1. Sign up for a Mastodon account with any Mastodon host (e.g. mastodon.social)
2. Log in with your Mastodon account (e.g. @[email protected])
3. Interact with other Mastodon users from other Mastodon hosts

To glue all of this together, Mastodon is federated (hence “Fediverse”), meaning all Mastodon hosts/servers communicate with each other to synchronise and share content. Some Fediverse platforms even federate with other totally different networks! Imagine if you could post to Twitter from the Instagram app. Madness.

Here are a few Fediverse platforms you might be interested in:

• Mastodon (Twitter/X alternative - by far the most popular federated social media platform)
• Pleroma (Twitter/X alternative)
• Lemmy (Reddit alternative - mostly niche tech-related communities so far)
• Pixelfed (Instagram/TikTok alternative)
• Friendica (Facebook alternative)
• PeerTube (YouTube alternative)

The obvious downside of the Fediverse is the size of its userbase. Right now it’s mostly just tech-savvy nerds, but the more Musk and Zuckerberg piss people off, the bigger it gets.

(And while it’s not technically part of the Fediverse, Matrix is a federated chat/messaging protocol if you’re looking for a modern-day IRC)

Let’s get weirder

But wait, there’s more! Here are some of my favourite tools and weird little corners of the internet:

• CyTube. Watch TV with strangers on the internet
• EposVox. YouTuber and digital gardener, retro & analogue vibes
• ooh.directory. Collection of thousands of blogs about every topic
• Open Archive. Maybe we should all just read books
• GOOD Search. Environmentally-friendly, ethical search engine