I have been fascinated for a long time with really cool websites that make full use of the potential of what you can do with a web. I don’t just mean sites that are essentialy just documents on a screen
There’s so many interesting websites with fun content, but they just aren’t that easy to know about. There has been this trend in the last decade of the internet getting smaller while power accumalated with aggregators
I wasn’t really around at the time, but I’ve read a bunch about individual websites and live journals owned by individuals rather than large corporations. Little pieces of the web completely controlled by individuals. A lot of those ideas seem to still be alive through the ideas of the indieweb. Even with that there has been a sudden resurgence in disdain about the state of the internet and smaller websites. Some examples of this discourse are:
- The Village Effect of the Greater Web
- Where have all the websites gone?
- The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web
- The Small Website Discoverability Crisis
- I Miss Human Curation
- The “Cheap” Web
None of this is to say that websites are disappearing and in fact they are still flourishing greatly. The top funnel for the internet is now a handful of websites, but even that idea is more of an exaggeration/opinion. In reality there’s no reason to restrict myself to only searching via google and discovering new things via Reddit.
As several of the posts above point out discovering corners of the internet is a curation challenge. Sites like Reddit or Hacker News have a large user base that can help funnel interesting content to the surface and Reddit even allows for even more niche topics to be discovered via subreddits. However, a lot of that discovery still follows a strict pattern. Within a certain subreddit you sorta know what you’re going to get based on the topic. Although content has a way of just recycling itself and getting reposted. r/InternetisBeautiful is probably one of the closest communities towards a topic agnostic discovery process. The only requirement is a having a cool factor.
Maggie Appleton’s distinction between the cozy web and the dark forest makes a lot of sense and digital gardening as a way to explore the web is fascinating. Personally, I have never really made deep connections on sites like Reddit. The whole site feels fairly inpersonal to me.
I know plenty of people have made deep connections from Reddit and Discord, but it just hasn’t been my own experience
Curating for niche topics is helpful when I need it, and general cool stuff is fun too, but what the average opinion of Reddit or Twitter finds cool isn’t necessarily what I find cool. So the idea of digital gardens that encapsulate an individual’s tastes and what they find cool is very appealing to me. It adds a bit more ethos behind the curation process.
The Point
I truly love the internet. It is just one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen, and my favorites parts are these fringe corners. The latest Twitter drama is fun, but nothing beats going down weird rabbit holes that get you to websites with URLs you’d never imagine of.
All that has led to me having an enormous amount of bookmarks that I have no way of managing. It’s become a daily occurrence of trying to close my browser tabs to inevitably ending with even more tabs to read or bookmark for later. I call this the Browsing Hydra It’s a similar problem to the bottomless side project list I have. With that I want to start to try to unpack the list and actually see what in the terribly unkept garden I have.
Tools
I’ve switched around between a lot of different things over the years. Origianlly everything was just a browser bookmark. Then I used pocket to make a distinction between content to read and interesting websites as a whole.
After that I was using Notion Web Clipper, but didn’t really like that too much, felt slow, and had a lot of duplicates because the extension doesn’t have too much feedback.
Now, I’m using Raindrop — The interface has been pretty nice, and I like the feedback on each site telling me if it’s saved or not.
That all being said none of these sources have been synced.
What’s Next
In the next few months I want to slowly start unpacking and showing interesting websites I’ve found. I’ve thought about using LLMs to help me classify and manage these bookmarks as well as add to this site. The Garden section of this site is sorta the pre-cursor to this undertaking.
Something to Whet the Pallet
A few other digital gardens and sites that try to aggregate interesting sites.