The handmade web is the real open internet, so fund it

Is the open internet dead, or did we just keep standing in the wrong room? The more we read about the state of the web, the more we think it's the second. The best things online have not vanished. They've moved out of the feed, and they won't come back on their own.

The prompt for this column is a Time Extension feature headlined "It's Tough Out There, So Check Out These Amazing Websites." Its answer isn't to fix the platforms. It's to point at sites worth visiting. Among them is Retro Dodo, which the outlet says it has often cited as a source and calls an attractive, content-rich retro gaming portal. That is a very old-school way of responding to a bad moment: you point at people doing good work and say "go there."

Waiting for platforms to improve is not a strategy

Consider what independent publishers say about their own traffic. In a 2025 indie web report, the author of Cybercultural describes a year in which AI summaries whittled away search referral traffic and social media continued its war against hyperlinks. The author notes that most large social services (Facebook, X, Threads, LinkedIn and others) are now biased against links, and that Hacker News front-page hits accounted for about 85% of the site's social referral traffic. Meanwhile, Google Discover sent a pitiful 112 clicks all year.

That is not a set of platforms on the verge of reform. It's a set of systems whose incentives, in our view, are to keep you inside. We see no commercial reason for them to reverse course, and that's our opinion, not a forecast. A reader who "waits for things to get better" is effectively voting to keep the status quo.

The indie web is the successor, not the nostalgia act

It's easy to dismiss all this as a costume party for the late 1990s. The New Public piece on the indie web does describe an aesthetic of gifs, funky cursors and personal sites. But look at what it says matters: slow, intentional exploration driven by curiosity, and freedom from branding, growth and monetization. Daniel Murray, who runs Melonking, says he wanted to code it badly and cram it with low-quality images. That's not a business plan. It's what a creative space looks like when nobody is optimizing it.

This is also familiar territory for us. The demoscene has always worked this way: made by hobbyists, shared at gatherings, valued for craft rather than reach. The IndieWeb community's principles are almost a manifesto for that culture: own your domain, publish on your own site first, keep your content. It also runs meetups, Homebrew Website Club and the two-day IndieWebCamp. A movement that holds actual events, rather than just posting about itself, is at least trying to be a community and not an audience.

Support it, but don't pretend it's pure

Nuance matters here. Even the movement's friends can't agree on terms. The IndieWeb wiki's own entry on the small web admits the phrase is vague and used for different projects, and one critic quoted there calls hosting on someone else's servers "digital green-washing." Dan Q, in his reaction to the New Public article, points out the irony of reading a celebration of the indie web on Substack, a platform where others stay in control of your presence.

We think that irony is a feature of the moment, not a refutation. Purity tests are a luxury; the people making the best stuff are working with what they have. The Cybercultural author is even exploring turning each series of posts into a self-published book, reasoning that books have a naturally longer shelf life than websites. Physical objects, it seems, can be a preservation strategy.

So what should a curious reader actually do? Our view, in practical terms:

• Subscribe directly: RSS, newsletters from the author's own domain, a physical magazine subscription.
• Link generously. Links are the currency algorithms refuse to pay.
• Donate or buy something small. The IndieWeb itself lists swag and Open Collective donations as ways to help.
• Make a page of your own, however ugly. "HTML is still good," as a line quoted on the wiki's small web page puts it, and it's hard to argue with.

Verdict

The grim internet is real, but "the internet" was always a plural noun. The handmade web of personal sites won't replace the giants and, as New Public notes, if it went mainstream it wouldn't be small or indie anymore. That's fine. It doesn't need to win. It needs to survive, and survival here depends on readers behaving less like users and more like patrons. Pick three independent sites this week, subscribe somewhere the platform can't throttle you, and send someone a link. That's the whole program, and it's more effective than any wait-and-see.