Exploring the small web

tl;dr: I just published a blogroll

Getting more involved with the small web was one of the best decisions of 2025. I wanted to improve my relationship with the internet.

I went from rarely reading blogs to a daily habit. I plan on writing on the tools and actions that helped me with that, but first I wanted to tackle a challenge of the small web: discoverability.

JA Westenberg’s post The Case for Blogging in the Ruins inspired me to write about it.

It is hard to find good blogs. Especially because there are no clear signals if a blog will be a good fit for you. It’s more about writer/reader fit than objective quality, which makes the subject of blog discovery even harder.

My favorite personal websites don’t necessarily cover a specific topic (even though most of my reading is related to tech), but are written by interesting people with different takes and points of view than the cliches of social media.

My most common (and favorite) method of discovering new sites is blogs linking to other blogs.

That’s why I’m increasingly convinced that bloggers people who want to foster and help the indie web have the responsibility of constantly recommending and linking to other blogs.

So I decided to add a blogroll to this site and help share some of my favorite indie writers.

By definition, good blogs will be hard to find. The whole idea of the small web is independence, decentralization, and the lack of a single directory.

There are some very cool and good projects out there that do that, but they will always be limited in their effectiveness (by design). Bear Blog Discovery Feed, Kagi Small Web

Simon Willison (a very famous blogger himself) has an interesting idea for those who don’t know what to write about, that resonates strongly with the discoverability issue.

I wish people would post more links to interesting things I feel like Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok have pushed a lot of people out of the habit of doing that, by penalizing shared links in the various “algorithms” Bluesky doesn’t have that misfeature, thankfully! (In my ideal world everyone would get their own link blog too, but sharing links on Bluesky and Mastodon is almost as good)

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/

In this simple post Web vs Apps, Alex mentions two people, introduces an interesting original idea, and adds his comments and his own experience on the topic.

The post is simple, short, and low stakes. It’s a good inspiration for me for what a “casual” post can look like.