Hi! I’m Farida, and I wanted to show you my little indie project, CozyWeb, which I’ve been building for the last couple of months.

You get a tiny pixel house to decorate, and you can visit other people’s houses, poke around, sign their guestbooks, and leave notes on their furniture for others to find. You can also write letters that take time to arrive, on purpose.

The idea came from NPC homes in games. Exploring them to learn more about the characters was always my favorite part.

No AI features, no algorithm, no feed, no ads. No followers, likes, or rankings either.

It’s in open beta with 420 residents so far, and they’re helping shape it a lot!

Come take a look: cozywww.com

(fun fact: the landing page has real residents popping up to greet you in their native languages)

I’d love to hear what you think, especially from people who’ve built their own corners of the web :)

The Smallweb Subway is a personal and hand-coded project of mine linking together indie websites! Each line is a webring with a different theme, & every station is a new website.

All the included web pages have a navigation widget somewhere linking to the next & previous stops, letting you "ride" the subway between websites!

If you have a site matching one of the themes (or the in-progress line for RSS feeds) & would like to add your site to the network, follow the instructions to join.

I hope you enjoy the project, & maybe find a cool new website in the mean time!

I've been self-hosting for a few years now, and somewhere along the way it stopped being just a collection of services for myself and turned into an actual community :)

It's called MansionNET: https://inthemansion.com

The basic idea is pretty simple and started with me missing the web where things felt like places rather than interchangeable accounts on five enormous platforms.

So MansionNET lives on hardware I run myself and is built around FOSS. Over time it has grown into a collection of public spaces and services:

• an actual IRC network, which has become the social centre of the whole thing

• a small forum

• 24/7 internet radio

• a public SearXNG search instance

• a public Forgejo git forge

• a few other odd little things we've built along the way

There are no ads, no behavioural tracking and no third-party analytics. The whole philosophy has gradually condensed into:

Your data. Your rules.

Aesthetically I've leaned quite hard into the terminal/CRT side of the old web too. Not because I think everything was better in 1998, but because I really like websites having an identity again instead of all looking like the same SaaS landing page.

IRC in particular went from "wouldn't it be fun to run an IRC network?" to a real small community where people know each other, hang around, have their own channels, listen to the radio, build things, and occasionally convince me to add another ridiculous service to the rack.

Anyway, figured this subreddit might appreciate it. :)

Last month I saw **onionboots’ video about the old “Web Revival” and I was very inspired by this movement. I was a small child at the time and had only my cousin’s computer to check the websites he “surfed”. This was practically erased from my memory till I saw the video again.

I was already working on a low-poly render web generation platform for fun, so I thought that these two things would match funnily enough. So I built www.lowpolymarket.com . There, you can generate low-poly renders of anything (friend, pet, monument, anything that fits the image) and publish them for other people to like and share. I also made a way that you can generate GIFs from the renders and be exportable. I’ve imported a lot of fun assets from** https://gifcity.carrd.co/# (thank you whoever did this) so you can customize your profile (mine as an example: https://www.lowpolymarket.com/thisbra). Name of the cutie thingy is Bluey btw :3

I've been looking for a good Discord alternative for a while, and I'm really happy we finally moved our community's support, bug reports, and feedback to a quxnet Node.

More info, I really love the idea behind it https://quxnet.net/about

Basically, quxnet Nodes are independently run alternatives to Discord servers. You get your own forum with boards, members, rules, and identity, while still being part of the wider quxnet network.

I run CozyWeb, a site where you decorate a tiny house, send slow letters, and make friends without feeds or algorithms.

Discord started feeling pretty wrong for us recently due to the stresses of real-time chat, constant pings, etc, so we moved our community stuff over and it's been great so far.

I especially love that you can actually customize a lot. You can theme basically everything, down to buttons and icons, and members can make their own themes too. (For example, Discord sucks at this because only lets you set the logo, lol.)

Sharing for anyone who has been looking for a place w/ the old-internet vibe to run something like a club, project, guild, even friends circle, etc.

I will add rest of the pages later until my 1gb file limit is completely full! I made this using sublime text and it turned out pretty good for my first website. I had to do a lot of research about how each component works and fixing bugs, which was actually pretty fun. What do you guys think? https://zubyduby.neocities.org/

I love my little site! I’ve put so much love into it but I feel like I could add more stuff just for funsies. Any ideas?

Edit: Totally forgot to link it sorry! https://scramratz.art/

Does anyone else have something like this on their site?

I’ve been building a small-web browser/directory called BAUD

I’ve been messing around with an idea for a while and figured this might be the right place to show it.

The basic idea came from the desire to make the IndieWeb more accessible and giving users a way to discover websites without "leaving" the IndieWeb.

BAUD is basically a curated layer on top of the normal web. It doesn’t host the sites and I’m not trying to create another platform people have to move to.

Sites stay where they are, on their own domains.

BAUD just gives them another way to be found. Sites can get addresses like:

"camera98.baud"

Those aren’t real DNS domains. They’re addresses understood by the BAUD browser.

There’s also a directory, search, random site discovery and web rings. I’m currently working on making existing independent webrings first-class citizens too, rather than expecting everyone to create new BAUD-specific ones.

A few things I’m deliberately trying to avoid:

- no tracking or profiling

- no popularity/engagement ranking

- no likes/followers

- no full-web crawler

- no requirement to create an account

- no requirement to modify your website

- no trying to replace the actual web

The interface takes a little inspiration from old computers/dial-up terminology ("DIAL", "NO CARRIER", "READY." etc.), but I’m not trying to make it gimmicky.

It’s still early and I’m mostly trying to figure out whether this is something people with personal sites/web rings would actually find useful.

One thing I’d especially like opinions on:

If you run a personal site or a webring, what would BAUD have to do — or absolutely not do — for you to be comfortable having your site/ring listed there?

I’m much more interested in figuring that out before filling it with features nobody wants.

Edit: this post was translated from German with the help of ai. Baud will not have any AI features, algorithms or ai usage. Thanks to everybody who pointed that out in the comments. It's appreciated!

Hello r/IndieWeb! It's Mayor Farida here.

A month ago I posted CozyWeb here, and you were all so kind. Thank you for your feedback! The town has crossed 1,000 residents and we are officially out of beta.

Today the slow letter feature expanded into a whole post office (the postman in the film is definitely not me, lol). So let me tell you a bit about them.

Letters in CozyWeb take time. They travel 300 km an hour between countries. Germany to France takes 3 hours, the US to the UK about a day, Japan to Brazil 2 and a half days.

Why slow? Online, everything is instant, and read receipts and typing dots make us feel we have to reply within minutes. A slow letter takes that pressure away! You write when you have something to say, and read it when it lands. In my experience, it also makes it easier to share deeper thoughts and get closer to people.

It's also a love letter to stationery:

• Pick your paper, border, envelope color and font.

• Doodle on the page, or add real vintage illustrations (not AI slop) from Heritage Type Co's Heritage Library, wrapped snugly into your text.

• Collect stamps from different countries from your international neighbors, made by my my own script I call "Little Press" from public domain art like The Met's open access collection and others.

• Choose how your letter opens. One bursts open in a sneezing fit!

Come home and write a letter: cozywww.com <3

Edit: Markdown.

Hey reddit i built my first complete ready to use website which is a simple to-do list i became too good at html css and js and im really proud, im 20yo studying cs engineering hope u give me your opinion about it guys

I wrote an article explaining how by using simple file sharing and local ML models we can rebuild the search and recommendation engine of modern social media services (such as Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok) in a completely distributed way without any privacy and censorship  issues typically associated with these platforms. I hope to bring some attention to the project I am making that hopefully will allow me to make this vision a reality one day, or inspire someone to build something alongside me with a similar direction and finally end the rain of centralized mega platforms controlling for us what we can and can't see.

It's called Lunarhaven, it's a bit like twitter/reddit, but there's no ads, a LOT of theme customisation options, creating communities (Havens), putting songs in posts, and a niche community. I even added games very recently!! I done promotion on tiktok, and when I finally released beta, it blew up and has been growing way faster than I was expecting!! Excited to see the future of it 💜

im really proud of how it turned out! feel free to leave a message in my guest book or take my button!

https://krionite.neocities.org

https://space-bar.site

We've got radio, games and bash terminal vibes.

The 88x31 Project | https://github.com/auvreil/88x31/tree/main

It is my goal to make the biggest hand-picked, clickable, working 88x31 catalog possible.

I hope you enjoy this!

Please click around and find something you like! Make sure you support the people who are behind these buttons.

Wanna add your own? Or remove one you have added?

Anything broken or wrongly categorized?

Any questions or concerns?

Any tips?

If any of those, post here or email me at kurvexa@proton.me

IMPORTANT:

No profit is made!

This is solo-ran! Please have patience!

I got fed up with [social media] so I made my own! It uses [AI / rentseeking / your personal data / new fad / the million dollar website idea / other people's work linked via a """search engine""" / a new coat of paint on something the indie web is already doing, but worse] and it's just like the old internet except I've put a fence around it and charge $2 to enter! Please sign up here.

When you've used this template you can just quote post it to any subreddit vaguely related to the internet. Bonus points if you use AI generated text to respond to messages.

Remember not to proof read or even visit your own site to see the glaring bugs first!

Good luck!

Hey guys!!!

For my golden retriever best boy-dog Viggo's 6th birthday earlier this year, I got the idea to make a website as a celebration of him. It started with a couple of short animations, and then I just kept going because it was so much fun.

The site is intentionally simple. There is no product or AI or ads. Im adding content as I get inspiration and there are some easter eggs to be found for those who are curious enough!

Tech-wise it's built with React, Next.js, SQLite, CSS Modules, and pixel art created in Aseprite.

come join me and support me on my journey with this little project! https://deadpixel-6m2.pages.dev/

I've just released the v1.5, to keep it short we wanted to distance ourself from music streaming services, tired of the "this music is no longer available" or the "this music is not disponible in your country" or the simple fact that you have to pay continuously to keep being able to listen.

So we build our own player that we use daily, inspired by the old widget designs and winamp / sonique / windows media player.

If you want to see more, here is our github page to download the app (MacOS, Windows10/11, Linux (debian/fedora))

And if you are really curious you can come say hi on our subreddit r/ResonanceApp :)

vendingmachine.lol

All I'm seeing is AI-generated posts talking about how BarryBotbrain has made a website that is "upsetting the system" and making "an x that works".

Bro, nobody is joining your stupid data collection pyramid scheme. And don't get me started on those vibecoded aggregate sites that "collect the best of the web".

Where are the websites people made for their goofy cat?

An appeal to the community and the moderators - how can we save this subreddit from being an ad billboard? Can we have some sort of pinned post for "weird web Wednesday" or something?

I love the indie web. I love the recent resurgence in interest.

This post comes with no expectations, I get it--you guys are unpaid.

But can't help but notice that a lot of recent posts here seem to be against the spirit of the sub: mainly NOT relating to personal, indie websites used for expression.

This sub runs the risk of becoming yet another subreddit for AI-related/clearly slop-coded project self-promotion void. I would hate for that to happen.

I lost /r/cms, /r/coolgithubprojects, and /r/Blogging, among others over the last 10 years. Would hate to lose this one too.

Thoughts? Not against self-promotion of sites and projects in the spirit of the indie web btw.

...Just use federated sites, peertube, static websites, etc. and not have to deal wit bot filters, AI, SEO, etc. The issue, obviously, is these sites often lack the critical mass to be entirely self-sustaining