The Handmade Web

It's 3:47pm on a Saturday afternoon in 2026. I'm attending this class by Trevor and Amalina at the National Library. They'd like to convince us to be more mindful about what's happening on the internet.

How to do that? Start at the very start!

At the beginning, there was Geocities. People were creating their own webpages. The templates weren't great. There aren't fancy AI filters that you can add to photos. With the advent of social media, these things became less popular. So geocities closed in 2009.

But because of the utter dominance of big tech, people now crave something less aggressive(I.e. not linkedIN). There is now neocities(where this site is hosted), reincarnation of Geocities. Another alternative is nekoweb.org.

In an era of Global AI Wars, Doom Scrolling and the Attention Economy, its easy to think of the internet as an evil place. Amalina is proposing a third way: mindful engagement with the internet.


Amalina: “A yearning for a softer and algorithm-free internet, not about selling yourself or being sold something”.


Here's a good mental model: There are two internets that we can choose to explore.

Internet #1: Singular

FAANG-run web where you end up on endless late night doom scrolls. You go only where the algorithm takes you.

Internet #2: Branching

Amalina likens this to a Garden. Where you enter and explore. The old-style internet of discovery, blogs, the feeling that you could find anything(for better and for worse). Where you could get bored after awhile.Trevor says this movement feels like gentle protest to reclaim our attention.


Some Handmade Websites

32bit.cafe

naiveweekly.com

polina-lobanova

nico-chilla

pointerpointer.com (insane idea)


Imagine your version of an Ideal Web Below ✏ ✏ ✏