how to navigate the indie web
This post is meant as a guide for stumbling upon corners of the indie web that are hard to come across any other way.
The 'tiny web' or 'indie web' is something you hear about frequently if you read a lot of blogs. It doesn't need to be said, but there are very few of us – people who keep blogs unaffiliated with any social media platform. The "tiny web" is supposedly reminiscent of the way things were on the internet, back in the 90s or early 2000's, but I was never there to experience that.
You can read articles about this "old web," about how it was filled with niche, personal websites that helped people find each other. MySpace is a name you've probably heard before, but The Atlantic put out a cool article about BlackPlanet which describes the vibe well. "Salonlike" is a good way of putting it, as is this excerpt:
"What we think Black Twitter is today is actually what BlackPlanet was eons ago in terms of connecting and building authentic community," Hubbard said. "Except there was levels of protection within BlackPlanet that we never got on Twitter."
It turns out that BlackPlanet actually inspired the launch of MySpace four years later, according to the article. Cool!
In decades since then, the indie web has taken many different forms. Neocities, where users can make static websites in online "neighborhoods," sprang up in 2013 as a counterpart to its defunct predecessor GeoCities. Cohost — some of you might remember Cohost. It existed between 2022 and 2024, and while I was never aware of it until after it was discontinued, I read many an elegy by those who migrated from cohost to bearblog following its dissolution. They were such beautiful memorials too, I greatly wished I could have been part of what they were missing.
"Cohost was built on the radical assumption that users would curate their own feeds; that they'd actively work to seek out things that interested them. It was a website where you could run out of posts to read. It didn't even have pull-to-reload or an infinite scroll, for chrissakes.
This design wasn't for everyone. It made a very particular demand of its users: that they bring just a little curiosity and openness to it. To some, this demand was an unforgivable slight."
(from azhdarchid)
The indie web (including, while it lasted, Cohost) truly respects the right to psychological sovereignty that I've called for. No dark patterns, no structural nudges into addiction. Just people and the stuff they write.
The charm of the indie web is fundamentally that it is small and countercultural. However, that's also the exact thing that makes it hard to find your way around. Bearblog does a decent job of keeping track of the most recent and highest-upvoted recent posts, as well as having a "search" feature. The problem, of course (which is intrinsic to any large group) is that the thoughts of random strangers usually aren't all that interesting to me. I want to read things written by people who are expressive and poetic. Naturally, that's harder to find.
blogrolls
The tiny web has its own answer to this — the blogroll. A list of links to other people's blogs, found on a designated page (mine is called bookshelf.) It's perfect for connecting a small group — if you find one person's blog that you really like, you can see their friends' blogs, and those friends' blogs, like the deepening roots of a tree. But you eventually run out — and what happens if the blogs don't have the thing in common that made you like that first blog so much in the first place? It's hard to stumble upon something new.
introducing randomness
- tiny awards – a project to "celebrate the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web."
- internet phone book – "an annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web." The group that runs this is all sold out of physical copies of their internet phone book, but what I most enjoy is their dial-a-site feature which allows you to enter a number and be directed to a corresponding blog. Right now they have 737 blogs!
- a blog directory – essentially a very big blogroll, which you can nominate a blog for.
- ye olde blogroll – another very big blogroll, this one with topics you can filter by.
keeping track of it all
As I started to spend more time on bearblog, I had a handful of blogs I would check frequently. I would wake up, type in their URL, and see that there were no new blog posts for me to read. I would open a new tab and type another URL, with the same result. I had a bunch of different blogs I wanted to read, but something about the mechanics of rapidly opening and checking 10 different websites, with none of them having any new updates, felt bad. Like a dopamine circuit that was never giving a reward, I felt as though I was damaging my own attention span with this routine.
Many bearblogs allow you to subscribe via email, but not all. The emails are written by an individual human, which is a very nice touch. But there is another way to keep track of posts and articles, which is called RSS.
rss
RSS is a way of subscribing to websites such that new posts will be kept track of in your rss feed reader, without you needing to check any of those specific sites. It's very old, having been invented in 1999, and was popular on the early web. There's nothing you need to download, the computer takes care of keeping track of updates with a network protocol. There are many implementations, but I use the one made by Meadow, which is called mire. The way it works is you simply visit the mire rss feeder website, subscribe to a few different rss feeds, and then when new posts or articles are published on those websites, they will appear on your "home" page. There's no emails, no notifications — the only way you'll hear about these updates is by visiting the mire site and logging in. It's extremely respectful of your attention.
When you click on a post, the emoji next to its title will change from 💌 to 📜. That's the only thing that will happen. (Since the feed reader collects only the bare minimum of information about you, it won't know if you've read a post somewhere else — what the emoji really keeps track of is whether you've clicked on a post through the feed reader, not whether you've read it.)

The RSS icon.
Although rss is pretty old, it's still supported by a large number of websites and online publications! If you see an icon that looks like the wifi symbol but tipped on its side, that means a site supports rss. Every bearblog also supports rss — even if there isn't a "subscribe via rss" link anywhere, if you type the bearblog URL and add "/feed", that's the link you should paste to subscribe via rss.
In simple terms: To subscribe to a website via rss, paste the url of the RSS feed (such as https://cortrinkau.bearblog.dev/feed) into the "subscriptions" box of your feed reader. Make sure to save it by clicking "subscribe." Then you'll see updates, if there are any, whenever you open your feed reader!