Web Wanderings #15
Rediscover the joy of online exploration! Web Wandering shares a hand-picked selection of the most awesome websites you won't find anywhere else.
Dear fellow Hikers,
2025 was a successful year for Cloudhiker, and I warmly recommend you the recap of the last year, where I share a lot of interesting statistics, numbers and a few thoughts on what was and what comes.
Just before the end of the year, thousands of people visited Cloudhiker and explored the web with us - thank you Reddit! 😜 And because our community grew by so many cool new peeps, I would like to take this chance to spark interest for the beloved Small Web in you. Aside from Facebook, Google and Amazon, there’s a huge community building a web that is free of corporate greed, hate and grudge. This part of the web has many names, but in its core, it’s just about you, me, and everybody else who likes to create and share, as in splitting the love and increasing the value for everyone. 🩵
This edition of Web Wanderings is solely about this very special part of the web, the foundation it is built upon, and the organizations supporting it.
This edition is also available on Cloudhiker as a Collection so you can find, like and collect the sites of this Edition: Web Wanderings #15
Indie Web
The Indie Web community is one of the foundations of the Indie Web. People gather in this community to share, discuss and develop for their very own websites, their “digital gardens“. Aside from the extensive wiki there are countless meetups and events every month, all around the globe.
One of its core principles is that your data solely belongs to yourself, and is free from platforms or proprietary formats and protocols. You are free to put your data, your content, anywhere you want and share it with everybody.
Indie Web is one of the first communities I visited when I first learned about the small web, the indie web, and until this day, it has a special place in my heart, although I am less active in the community as I would like to be.
Neocities
So, you want to create your very own website, but don’t know where to start? I dare you to NOT enter “create personal website“ in Google and go with the first result. Instead, become part of Neocities.
Some people may remember Geocities, which was an awesome free website hosting service, that was then bought by the shitheads over at Yahoo and then run into the ground. Neocities is a revival of that, celebrating the independent, Small Web. You can start for free with your personal website and just start writing. Trust me, it’s fun to start with a blank canvas, and not with a fancy looking template that every other influencer uses for his protein shake advertisement blog.
If you love Neocities, please support them by becoming a supporter. It’s even cheaper than going with any other big commercial vendor.
Oh… and I almost forgot: Cloudhiker has a Neocities page, too!
Green Web Foundation
https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org
Website are just files on someone else’s computer. This computer has to be powered on 24/7. And power does not come out of nowhere. Cloudhiker, for example, is hosted by Hetzner, a German server provider that powers their datacenters with green energy. If you run your website, do it with green energy. The Green Web Foundation provides tools and knowledge to make your website green.
Speaking of running your own website… today’s standard is to throw everything on your website that could potentially lead to a click, a like, a share, or whatever generates money for the owner. Website become increasingly large, need more and more power to run on the visitors browser. The Green Web Foundation also has a tool to check how much emissions your website generates. Cloudhiker, for example, generates about 1.4 grams of CO2 per visit. To offset this, I plant trees for Cloudhiker via Tree Nation. 🌱
The Old Net
How about if we stay within the past (kind of) and have a nostalgic look back at what the web looked like decades ago.
The Old Net is probably one of the best websites to start your journey. It acts as a search engine for going back in time with the Wayback Machine, and a digital archive of the old Geocities pages. The design of The Old Net alone makes me giggle, with the remarkable visitors counter, pixelated animated emoji and a layout done by tables. 😂
Happy exploring!
Wiby
Ok, that will be the last “old web“ thing on this list, I promise. Wiby is the second search engine dedicated to the long forgotten realms of table layouts, marquee text and horrible neon colors. Enter what you’re searching for, or maybe let Wiby surprise you with a random page, just like with Cloudhiker…?!
Do you like all those websites and want to explore more? Cloudhiker has 29,000+ sites all waiting for you to be discovered! Totally free, no account needed.
Yesterweb
I just mentioned Geocities twice. Those were great times. I hosted my first website with Lima City, a hosting service from Germany. The website was ugly, but it was mine. And it was solely built with my damn bare hands and some graphics put together within Photoshop CS1 (that I definitely bought).
Where was I? Oh yes, the yesterday’s web and a community dedicated to bringing the philosophy and experience back. Yesterweb was bought to life with the idea to revive what we now know as the Small Web, Indie Web or Digital Gardens. Although the community forums itself were shut down in 2023, the ideology and the manifest remain as an important pillar of the modern, Small Web.
The Fediverse
https://joinfediverse.wiki
Aside from all the personal websites and digital gardens, people like to gather somewhere to talk and share. Normal people call this social media. The cool people call it the Fediverse.
What’s the Fediverse, you’re asking? It’s social media, but WAAAAY BETTER. The primary idea of the Fediverse is that content does not belong to a single platform, but can be seen, liked or even commented or reposted by anyone who is part if the Fediverse. Imagine posting something on Instagram (here called Pixelfed) and someone on Twitter can see and like it. Isn’t that cool?!
Aside from being connected with everyone, it is built to benefit people, not corporations. About respecting users privacy, not sending every action to marketing agencies.
By the way: Cloudhiker is active in the Fediverse. You can follow it via its profile on Mastodon.
Kagi Small Web
Kagi is a paid search engine, and putting them here might seem counter-intuitive. Why should a commercial service be put into this edition? Because they actually care. Their mission is defined around building for a friendly internet, more human and centered around people. I personally endorse their efforts in the Small Web space by building an exploration tool dedicated to small, personal blogs. Yeah, quite similar to Cloudhiker. And that’s cool!
EFF
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is probably one of the most important organizations in our modern life - and you probably don’t even know it. So, what does they do?
Their primary focus is digital privacy and free speech. Who know how the modern internet would look like without organizations like the EFF?! Probably a lot worse, with even stricter controls (and the resulting punishments) by governments and corporations, with less privacy and less safe spaces for us, the people.
There are hundred, if not thousand other organizations which also deserve a place right here, but the space is limited. If you can spare a dollar or two, please donate to those orgs to support their fight for your freedom, safety and keeping the last bits of the internet well and alive. 🙏
The Internet Archive
I have thought quite a while which link to put here as the last important brick for the foundation of the Small Web. And even though I do not endorse everything they do, the Internet Archive is one of the most important free organizations of the internet. They preserve billions of websites, their content and what’s important to the people. They are doing a good job and deserve this last stop, as a recognition of their efforts and their fighting for their historic archive.
Let’s wrap this episode up with an ode to the Small Web. And ode to all the people building great things without the need of generating an endless stream of money. A human web. A web for us.
Let’s bring the internet back to its roots. By starting with yourself. Build a website. Share what you love. Invite friends and family. Share it with the world. 🩵
Like every time, I would like to ask you for feedback. Hearing what you think, what you like or dislike, help me making Cloudhiker and this wonderful Web Wanderings series better and better. If you want to be notified on new editions of Web Wanderings, subscribe here:
When you’re done with this episode, why not hop on Cloudhiker and see what weird and wonderful corners of the web you can find? 👀