All that to say, a search engine cannot be your sole source of information and discovery. Its strength is in helping you find specific things when you need them, but for a well-rounded information gathering experience, we all need to put more faith into other discovery methods, especially for the independent, secret web.

Before the internet went corporate, it was weird, wonderful, and deeply personal. People built websites just because they had something to share. This directory is full of sites that bring back that feeling.

Lightweight email (128MB mailbox, IMAP/POP3/SMTP) + XMPP instant messaging. Anonymous registration, encrypted storage, no tracking. Deliberate constraints for mindful communication.

A self-hostable personal cloud inspired by serverless platforms and cgi-bin.

The Personal Web, to many people, only exists in a select few places. It could be solely sites on Blogspot, or Neocities, or some other adjacent platform, and that to them is the “Personal Web”. However, once you’ve exhausted these places and found the sites that you find interesting, it’s extremely difficult to figure out where to go next—to go to some unknown territory that you don’t even know exists.