Discovery Tools for Independent Websites
Friday 23 May 2025
Earlier today I came across a blog post from Fred Rocha which perfectly describes my own fascination with the small independent web and the type of interactions it facilitates.
Blog post: Small (web) is beautiful - Fred Rocha
He writes:
I dream of a web that fosters healthy conversations, together with personal and intellectual growth. The world is diverse and fascinating, and we can be information explorers together. Whenever I write a longform blog post and share it with the world (on my RSS feed, on Mastodon / ActivityPub or on Reddit), I get people recommending me similar reads, which in turn I use to improve the original blog post (and my own personal knowledge). I love it when people challenge my ideas — as that opens my mind to unseen perspectives — and I wish the web was a safe place where this could happen much more often.
The feedback loop between writers, creators, and developers encourages information exchange with a shared goal: the improvement of the web as a democratic medium of interpersonal communication.
Recommendations via corporate algorithms can’t replicate the satisfaction of being understood by another person. Knowing that someone took the time engage with your thoughts is invaluable. A “like” or a “retweet” may show agreement or approval. But someone taking time out of their day to reply via blog post or e-mail? In today’s digital world, it’s the closest thing we have to acknowledging each other’s agency. I can’t recall all the things I liked or shared online by clicking a button, but I remember every time I pull out my laptop, set some background music, make myself a coffee and write a response to someone.
In the spirit of the indieweb, and in response to Fred’s question about indie web discovery tools, below is a list of some of the ones I’ve been using lately.
Table of Contents
Directories
A place to find good blogs that interest you created and maintained by Phil Gyford.
Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time. A project by Andreas Gohr.
A community of like-minded website hobbyists and professionals helping to make the personal web fruitful and bountiful again, full of self-expression and removing the capitalistic drive out of it.
A human edited, Indieweb directory.
Peelopaalu is an unsorted link collection hosted on Neocities.
The 512KB Club is a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet.
Search Engines
Marginalia Search is an independent open source Internet search engine operating out of Sweden. It is principally developed and operated by Viktor Lofgren.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.
Blogs
People and Blogs is a weekly newsletter series where interesting people talk about themselves and their blogs curated and maintained by Manuel Moreale.
A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform built and maintained by Herman Martinus
Static Hosting
Yay.Boo is a static site host created by Good Enough.
Neocities is a social network of 1,110,200 web sites that are bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. We offer free static web hosting and tools that allow you to create your own web site.
Static website hosting from a GitHub repository.
Porkbun is an ICANN accredited domain name registrar based out of the Pacific Northwest.
This list is limited to tools and sites I’m familiar with. If you’d like to make a suggestion feel free to write me an e-mail and I’ll check it out!