It started, the way these things do now, with a video the algorithm decided I should watch. There is some irony in that: the recommendation engine of a Big Tech platform handed me a film about leaving Big Tech platforms. The video is "A Web Revival: the Internet didn't die, you're just not on it" by a creator called onionboots. It opens with a question I had been quietly carrying for years without naming it: are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest really the future of the internet, or just the place we all got herded into? I watched the whole thing, then I watched it again, and then I opened about forty browser tabs and did not sleep much that night.
The argument is one I had half-formed myself but never put into words. For most of us the internet has shrunk down to a handful of apps. We scroll feeds we do not really enjoy, on platforms we do not control, which profile us so they can sell our attention, and we cannot even change the colors. The video's maker grew up in the late nineties and early two-thousands, building little sites on GeoCities and customizing Neopets profiles by hand, back when people, not platforms, owned the web. His point is not that the old internet died. It is that it never died. It got buried under the platforms, and most of us just stopped wandering far enough to find it. It is still there, a couple of clicks away, and there is far more of it than I expected.
What is actually out there is a movement people have started calling the web revival, sometimes the indie web. It is not one site or one company. It is thousands of personal websites, made and owned by individuals, hosted on small static hosts like Neocities or on someone's refurbished ThinkPad in a closet, all linking to one another. There is no feed and no algorithm deciding what you see next. You move by following links: someone's links page points to thirty neighbors, each of those points to thirty more, and you end up somewhere no recommendation engine would ever have shown you. The video describes it as drinking from a fire hydrant, which is about right. Most of those links open onto something a real person made by hand, for no reason other than that they wanted to.
The pieces that hold it together are old and low-tech. The first is the webring: a group of sites that agree to link to each other in a loop, so a visitor can click "next" and eventually travel the whole circle. Webrings were everywhere in the nineties, faded with the rise of search and social media, and have quietly come back. The rest is the links page, the guestbook, the live chat box tucked into the corner of a page. None of it needs an account. None of it tracks you. A lot of it does not even need JavaScript to read. It is the web doing the thing the platforms took away: letting strangers find each other on purpose.
Following the links led me to one ring that anchors a large part of this world: the XXIIVV webring, run by an artist and tool-maker who goes by Devine Lu Linvega. It is a ring of a couple hundred personal sites, and it is stricter than most. To join, your site has to be on your own domain, not a free subdomain. It has to have real content, at least ten pages and an about page, with blog posts not counting toward the total. And it has to work without scripting: if your site needs JavaScript to show its content or to navigate it, it is rejected. You join not through a form but by opening a pull request on a GitHub repository and editing the member list by hand. All of that is more inconvenient than it needs to be, and the inconvenience does the filtering. It keeps the ring full of sites made by people who cared enough to clear the bar.
Around that ring sits a community called Merveilles, French for "marvels". They describe themselves as a collective of people trying to better themselves and their surroundings through constant creation and play: experimental art, music, and code, an obsession with sustainability and doing more with less. It grew, fittingly, out of an online game's chatroom. Merveilles is not the webring and the webring is not Merveilles, but they overlap heavily, and discovering one is how you find the other.
What surprised me most was the shape of the social layer, which is the opposite of what a platform would build. The live, chatty part of Merveilles runs on a Mastodon instance, part of the fediverse, the federated network of independent social servers that talk to each other without a central owner. But you cannot just sign up. The instance is invite-only. The month I looked, it had about three hundred active people, a code of conduct, a set of house rules they call the Three Gates Of Speech, and an aesthetic rule that everyone's avatar must be black and white. There is a slower forum for longer conversations, a map showing where members are in the world, and a search engine that indexes the ring's sites. You get into the town by being part of the wider world first: by making something, by showing up, by being around. After a decade of platforms making signup as frictionless as possible so they could grow without limit, a community that makes joining harder on purpose, and is smaller for it, was not what I expected to find.
The deeper I went, the more I saw that the friction is doing real work. None of this scales, and none of it is trying to. A webring caps out at the patience of the person maintaining it. An invite-only instance with three hundred people will never be a billion. The sites load fast because they are small and made by hand, not because a growth team measured the load time. The video puts it well: if Discord and Instagram are New York City, the indie web is the countryside, dotted with small towns and villages where traffic trickles and the pace is slower. Nobody is optimizing you, and you are not the product. You are a person who wandered into someone's hand-built corner of the web and might stay a while.
That is the part I keep thinking about, because I build software for a living and spend most of my time on systems that are supposed to scale. There is something satisfying about making a thing that is not trying to grow at all: a site, a tool, a small useful thing, built because making it is enough, whether or not anyone ever shows up. A lot of the people in the revival worked that out years ago. They are not waiting for an audience. They are building, linking to each other, and leaving the door open. I found the door by accident, through a video an algorithm picked for me, which is a little funny, but I am glad I went through it. The old internet is not a memory. It is a place, and it is still taking new residents.