I have been trying to swap social media for blogs, probably due to nostalgia rather than good sense. There are a few sites now to make it easier to find small blogs, tools that act like modern-day webrings. For instance, there’s Kagi Small Web, where you can flip through recent blog posts and the similar indieblog.page. Marginalia, Feedle, Indieseek and Search My Site are search engines that prioritizes small sites which also have browsing options. Then there’s Ooh! Directory, modeled after the old Yahoo directory where you could browse sites by category. Then there are blogrolls, like Blogroll (lol). There is unfortunately (for me) a bias towards programming blogs on the small web, but there doesn’t have to be. It’s still entirely possible to create your own free blog on Tumblr, Bloggr, or Neocities. 

For the past few years, my touchpoint when describing the small web to friends has been Clive Thompson’s concept of “rewilding.”  He originally borrowed the idea from someone else, but it’s Thompson’s series of blog posts with suggestions on using sites like Marginalia to rewild your Internet browsing that have stuck with me through the years. The idea is that you break out from the algorithm and allow yourself chances to be surprised rather than marketed to. The recent changes to Meta’s policies and algorithms has me meditating on the concept once more. One of my sources for web wildness for the last few years has actually been Facebook groups. I keep getting suggestions to join groups about moss or clay pots or “pretending that we are boomer birders.” On Facebook, I was able to browse through many niche hobbyist forums, and the more I looked at, the more eccentric the next one the algorithm suggested was. I was successfully using the algorithm to rewild my browsing. Now I am trying to stay off of traditional social media but looking for that same experience.

There’s a tension between findability and avoiding the algorithm. Does a book blog like this really need to be “findable” though? Not really. I am going to add this blog to some of the webrings I mentioned so that people can stumble upon it (do you remember that website?) I hope it strikes people as a wildflower on the web, and not a weed.