Surfing the IndieWeb in 2026
2026-04-10
Surfing the IndieWeb is fun! Like many people my age (old millenial here, to be specific), I miss the Internet of the 90's and early 2000's. Until a couple of years back I thought it was gone for good. Luckily, I was wrong. This blog post is about how to (re)discover the indieweb, or the "small web", as some call it. It's essentially about non-corporate homepages and websites made by individuals such and you and I. I won't go into details on why this is cool and what specifically I like about the indieweb. Maybe in another post. Right now, let me just point you in the right direction so you can see for yourself.
If you want to start with the basics such as "what is it all about?" and "how do I join this?", you should go read the IndieWeb website first. It has great information and a great wiki with more technical details.
To actually discover the individual sites, use one of the following sources.
- Marginalia Search - Explore: A search engine and a nice way to get a list of random "small web" homepages with thumbnails. Hours of fun! And it's a one-man project. Impressive.
- Ye Olde Blogroll: Nice list of human curated blogs and sites, filtered by topic.
- indieblog.page: Another nice collection, has "open random blog", search, and the actual list.
- Blogosphere: This one was recently posted to "Hacker News". It shows recent posts from a collection of rss feeds, which is kinda cool.
- Kagi Small Web: Kagi has made it's own contribution to the small web by creating a search engine specifically for that corner of the Internet. I prefer Marginalia listed above, because I like being served a page full of thumbnails.
I could add many more collections and search engines, but let's keep it short for now.
I also want to mention a few communities specifically made to emulate the culture and whimsy of the old GeoCities website that many people my generation grew up on. It was the place to be before MySpace and the modern Internet.
- NeoCities: Modern recreation of the GeoCities concept. You could loose hours browsing some of the top hosted sites there.
- NekoWeb: A lot like NeoCities, but more whimsical -- and they seem to offer more services and tools than the above.
One thing you loose when you go from modern social networks to oldschool homepages, is the social aspect. You are no longer feeded content from other blogs by an algorithm, and connecting with others takes more effort. There are certain ways to fix that as well. NeoCities has social features built-in, so you can subscribe to other people's sites and comment on their updates. Another option is to use about ideas now, which crawls and aggregate people's "/now", "/about", and "/now" pages into a feed of sorts, all scraped from blogs around the Internet. I doesn't solve the "connect" part since you still need to find someone's email address or guestbook to connect with them. I feel like we are still in the early phases of the indieweb, and as it grows, people will invent more ways to connect with and discover content from its inhabitants.
All in all, I've fallen in love with the "small web" and plan on doing my part to contribute in the coming years. Expect more blog posts on the topic in the future.