viva indie web
hello!
Every so often I come across forums or videos about the “old” or more elegantly, the “indie” web. As a result, I’ve accumulated a relatively large list of these sites, and since it seems I enjoy writing posts aggregating things like this, I thought it would be a good way to flush them out. Thanks to every unnamed person that added to this collection!
Every Noise at Once was my first one of these sites, and I still think it’s up there as one of my favourites. It’s a beautiful tumbleweed of amazingly obscure and fascinating music genres of any background. A really elegant way to find new music, either by searching for an artist you know and finding adjacent genres and artists, or by scrolling randomly and clicking one on a whim. I particularly love how the genres are organized like a gradient, being related to their neighbors but covering such a massive spectrum. Being personally drawn to electronic music, Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music inhabits a similar structure, a gorgeous interactable evolutionary tree of electronic music. The Frequently Unasked Questions tab was a fun read, too.
Marginalia, Curlie and Internet Phone Book’s dial feature are human curated directories of things of awesome things on the web. Much better than google search, by any and all aspects.
In a similar fashion, there’s a couple sites that visualize various Wikipedia articles. The ones that I have saved are from halilb.dev and epfl.ch. I like the former for how you can directly view and read the articles on the page. The latter links articles together like an Obsidian vault, which is equally as cool. Wayne’s World is a massive directory of life science-adjacent articles and resources that I found particularly charming, both for the content and design. CARI also have an exciting collection of various aesthetics, akin to a curated pinterest for inspiration.
Per my previous post, I think the things to be happy about deserves another mention.
Similarly briefly, I found one called delphitools floating around.. somewhere but I think the creator shares almost my exact same passion for the small, classic web "And that web is out there. You just have to find it. And sometimes, you have to make it yourself". So cool!
Falling Fruit is an expansively mapped collection of botanical foragings. I just think it’s such an awesome project and a crazy thing that it exists at all. On a trend of globe-based ones, Radio Garden is a more popular one that lets you listen to radio channels worldwide. There’s something that’s subtly cool about seeing how the web can actually, truly be worldwide? Please send me any more sites like these.
For those using Last.fm, Scatter.fm can visualize your scrobbles in, as the title suggests, scatterplot.
There are also many sites like WINDOWS93 and Poolsuite, which seek to emulate an older era of computing systems. I’m sure that there are many, many more out there, but these are the ones that I’ve found and enjoyed.
If you are on bearblog, you probably know about things like Privacy Guides, and AlternativeTo, but I'm throwing them out here on the off chance that you don't and how there's so much more awesome bits of software that may be able to paint over some that you use right now!
Lastly is Zombo.com, of course. It seems that the original link seems to have a fresh batch of paint over it, so there's the link for what it was originally. I don't really know why, especially considering this was much beyond when I started using the internet, but there's no other way to describe this feeling of nostalgia for something that I haven't ever experienced before, oddly.
(Hey! I got curious and learned about Anemoia, which seems to somewhat formalize this feeling that I had, perhaps) (Also, if it wasn't clear, Wikipediais an unspoken addition to any list like this)
later! jo