Anyone here heard of the "indie web"?

Yea I've spent a lot of time developing stuff in the gemini community back in 2021 and 2022. Most of the sites I like to read are at least semi-technical or art related, but yea it's a nice cozy loose community of sorts I guess. Pretty much everyone is at least sorta leftist which is nice. Here's a few random sites you might find interesting to browse:

• https://100r.co/site/home.html
• https://eli.li/
• https://cadence.moe/blog
• https://sloum.colorfield.space/
• https://www.paritybit.ca/
• https://idiomdrottning.org/

or if you happen to be interested in tabletop rpgs

• https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/
• https://www.mindstormpress.com/

One of the ways these communities actually form or stay together at all is via "web rings" which literally just means a bunch of people join a list of similar sites and then on their site somewhere they link to the list and or to other sites on the list. For example: https://webring.xxiivv.com/#random

You can also find search engines and pages that attempt to categorize lots of these sites. Here's two search engines:

https://searchmysite.net/

Sites need to be manually submitted (and I think approved) to be added to the search index. For example a search of "plan9" will show articles written about the novel plan9 operating system which tend to be a lot more interesting and passionate than if you searched that on google or whatever. However, you can't really use is to like figure out your local bank's hours.

https://marginalia-search.com/

This is another interesting search engine, but it takes a different approach. Instead this one indexes most of the internet, including wikipedia and so forth, but highly prioritizes results that tend to be more "hand-made" rather than corporate.