The small, real, original web

Mostly true but not quite.

You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.

You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.

You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.

You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.

Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?

> And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that.

Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.

Didn't a lot of people come to the internet proper after first using outfits like AOL and Compuserve ? I wonder if those outfits served as "training grounds" or "boot camps", and what kind of culture shock their customers had upon hitting the "real net" (newsgroups etc.), and whether they learned "enough" netiquette before "graduating to" the wider net.

An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.

Articles like this one, talking about how the original web is still around, miss a key point IMO: that indie web that exists today is socially irrelevant. In the early millennium it was common for people meeting IRL to feel a sense of community because they followed a shared ecosystem of blogs, whether about a band, a religious denomination, a city neighborhood, or a travel subculture.

Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.

Quite ironic to post this on a platform that uses 1/4 of the screen for advertisement and a drowning GDPR prompt. (Also the CSS makes it tedious to read on a computer.)

Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?

Quite ironic to post this on a platform that uses 1/4 of the screen for advertisement and a drowning GDPR prompt. (Also the CSS makes it tedious to read on a computer.)

Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?

The Founder of donated to a controversial political party of Sweden.

Same reasoning to why we shouldn't be using Kagi because the founder uses Yandex, a Russian state search engine for a data source.

Yolo I guess.

Mostly true but not quite.

You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.

You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.

You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.

> And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that.

Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.

I'm still running multiple email systems the "old way". Been doing it for 30 years and don't intend to stop now, both at work and at home.

There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.

Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with:

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy

Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.

The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.

Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.

The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.

I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.

Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.

But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..

The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.

Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469

One of its founders donated to a party that opposes immigration into Sweden. Some people seem to think that this is a conflict of interest because they assume that the surveillance necessary to accomplish what they think that political party wants to do (they claim they want to do mass forced deportations) is at odds with Mullvad's mission.

I personally don't think a single founder making that contribution is a strong enough tie to Mullvad to expect it to influence their behavior. I also don't think there's any reason to think that that party's goal will necessarily entail the curbing of digital security products like VPNs.

If anything, I think that Mullvad taking a "it's his business; it's not our role to tell individuals what they can think or do" stance is exactly what I would like a VPN to do. Others disagree.

tl;dr: It still has a great reputation outside of the Blueksy crowd.

The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.

Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound.

Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)

The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.

It took less effort to setup a geocities page than a myspace account.

The Founder of donated to a controversial political party of Sweden.

Same reasoning to why we shouldn't be using Kagi because the founder uses Yandex, a Russian state search engine for a data source.

Yolo I guess.

If anything, I think that Mullvad taking a "it's his business; it's not our role to tell individuals what they can think or do" stance is exactly what I would like a VPN to do. Others disagree.

tl;dr: It still has a great reputation outside of the Blueksy crowd.

Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with:

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy

Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.

I'm still running multiple email systems the "old way". Been doing it for 30 years and don't intend to stop now, both at work and at home.

There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.

The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.

Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.

The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.

The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.

> Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.

Pro-marriage as in "prohibit marriage", I presume, since that is the cause to which he donated.[0]

https://www.pcmag.com/news/new-mozilla-ceo-addresses-anti-ga...

Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469

Thank you (and everyone else who replied). I wasn’t aware of this controversy.

I wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject, however, I’m glad when information is made public, as it allows everyone to weigh whether it should influence their decisions.

It took less effort to setup a geocities page than a myspace account.

In the golden era the care wasn't there. I didn't care someone said something offensive. You just kind of shrugged and moved on. It shouldn't be said but hey they did; report & ignore. That's why 4chan is 4chan, Encyclopaedia Dramatica et cetera.

Political correctness eventually tainted the internet as then if someone's values were hurt, drama would roll around only fuelling the troll further. This later led to gatekeeping and entitlement; Tumblr as example.

The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.

> Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.

Pro-marriage as in "prohibit marriage", I presume, since that is the cause to which he donated.[0]

https://www.pcmag.com/news/new-mozilla-ceo-addresses-anti-ga...

Thank you (and everyone else who replied). I wasn’t aware of this controversy.

I wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject, however, I’m glad when information is made public, as it allows everyone to weigh whether it should influence their decisions.

The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.

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!

Hacker Times

Hacker Times

The small, real, original web

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