Exploring the Small Web: 3 Sites by/for Humans

13 Sep 2024, 7:16 p.m.

I'm not a huge lover of corporate social media. Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter...they have their uses but I find them exhausting. I've got accounts on all of them because that's where most people are, but I much prefer personal homepages and hobby blogs and small, independant things of that nature. Ultimately what I look for online is human connection and human creativity, and algorithmic feeds and corporate megasites don't really provide that. Rather than following my first impulse of spewing out a few hundred words moaning about big tech and algorithms and how they've taken over the entire web, I thought it'd be nice if I went out into the wilds of the internet and found a few urls to share. I've selected three, two of which affected me on a personal level and one of which is a useful technical resource for users of niche operating systems. If anyone reading this has more interesting sites to share, drop me a line on Mastodon or send me an email. I'd love to find more of the human side of the internet.

1. Lou Plummer's self-titles blog

I found this and immediately read four recent posts, enjoying every one of them. I don't know this guy, but he's got a pleasant style and seems like a decent sort of chap. I was pretty touched by his post about his partner. Lou also has an old-school links blog as well as a couple of other tech-focused blogs I haven't checked out yet. Overall, he seems likeable and relatable. This is really the kind of stuff I look for when I'm scuttling through webrings (which still exist, as it turns out). A person, writing about personal things from a human perspective. That's the magic of the web for me.

2. Matthew Graybosch's blog at starbreaker.org

Might just be because I was born in the early 90s and got online pretty early due to my disabled brother being given a home computer by a charity and me swiftly becoming the family tech guy, but I love the retro feel of this site. It's another one that's new to me, though I'm enjoying what I'm reading so far. Matthew's post about fighting bad mental health with heavy metal and sheer bloody-mindedness really spoke to me, as someone who does the same. There's discussion of some heavy mental health topics in there though, so please bear that in mind before you follow the link. The playlist at the end of that post is damn solid, by the way. It'll definitely be going into my rotation.

3. Solene's blog at dataswamp.org

This last one isn't new to me, but I really like it. I love tinkering with the BSDs. I've spent a lot of time in FreeBSD, and I've installed NetBSD a time or three. But OpenBSD is my favourite of the Berkeley systems, for whatever reason (clinically relevant levels of paranoia might be a contributing factor). I actually use it about as much as I use Linux these days. It's a remarkable system, truly. I'll switch over to FreeBSD or Linux when I need containers or advanced virtualisation, but for day-to-day stuff it suits me down to the ground. Part of the reason I find it so pleasant to use is the extensive documentation, another part is Solene's blog. She does a great job of making the OS feel approachable and writes simply and clearly. She talks about Linux some of the time too, and is generally highly knowledgeable about tech and online privacy/security. I'm quite fond of her short post about lesser-known OpenBSD features.

In Conclusion

There's a lot of cool stuff out there. You can throw a query into wiby and find a whole bunch of sites made by people rather than companies. Though I do want to stress that I don't actually oppose corporate sites and platforms. I just don't want them to be literally everything online. The social media sites are a great way for nontechnical people to communicate and find one another, and I use them to check in on old friends and see what people are up to all the time. But ultimately I'm a nerd who remembers the internet of 20+ years ago and that's what feels like home to me. Personal sites, decentralised social networks with chronological feeds like Mastodon, RSS feeds, IRC, email. That's what makes me happy. Even with the jank. Especially with the jank.