Just thought I'd make a page listing the various websites and web related software I enjoy using. The reason I'm making this is because I try to "decentralise" my web activity, and use several tools to help make the internet fun again, and want to show my findings to those who also want to escape staring at big tech social media all day and start to diversify again. # Why can't you just not use them? # I wish it were that easy, but alas, it is not. Hard-to-Break habits side, everything circles around them in the end and it's hard to escape them entirely. It's also easy to forget about the rest of the web since most sites don't update nearly as often, and are otherwise left twidling your thumbs. I found some things that help me avoid the temptation to go on any big tech sites, and I hope they'll help youse, too. Worth pointing out that privacy and dencentralisation (in terms of the products themselves) aren't the aims. They're bonuses, sure but I tend to have negative associations with those terms, so don't expect everything here to serve those purposes. I can reccomend everything here won't use any targeted advertising, though! --- The first step imo is to find a search engine that isn't Google or Bing (...I'm sorry, I can't pretend people actually use that!), as those sites are owned by big tech, like to track you for targeted advertisements and so on. I also feel like they are also more likely to send you to another big tech site. Without further adeu, here are some search engines I like to use. This one is fairly obvious, but one thing I love about DuckDuckGo are the "bang" commands, which is when you type ! and then an acronym/name of the site you want to search on or visit. For example, to go on Wikipedia, you type !w, and for the Scots version, you type !wsco. IKt encourages me to search on the sites themselves rather than just using the one search engine for everything. It's also a great way to avoid Google, as you can always use !g as a backup if DuckDuckGo doesn't give yhou want you're looking for. Why is this a good way to avoid them? Because it gives you the security that you *can* use it, but I find that I use it less as a result, since DuckDuckGo has what I need, but it's good that it's there just in case! Bonus points for being available in Scottish Gaelic, too! Ecosia isn't quite as good as DuckDuckGo as a search engine, but I use it, and have it as my default search engine, out of concern for the environment. Ecosia has been proven to be legit with their claims of planting trees with every number of searches, so it's good to have them as your default engine so you can have some peace of mine that you're doing your bit for the environment, or at least you undo the potential damage you do by searching, as that actually takes up some power. --- Okay, youse have a good search engine selected, now what? Well, We need to avoid getting updates on the big social medias, better yet, avoid social media altogether. How? Well, I like to use programs that notifies you when a new item appears on a feed, and then you click on the notifications and they send and it directs you to the sites themselves, there are 2 programs I like to use to do this, one for Windows and Mac and one on Linux. Both of which are called "Feed Notifier", but aren't related. Alternatively, for Linux users, there's Tickr, which is scrolling text like a news-program, if that's more your cup of tea. So go find out if your favourite Youtube channel or comic artist has their own website, find an RSS feed and subscribe to it! --- Now for Youtube Alternatives Not a Youtube alternative persè, but Retrounlim is a nice place to see retro media related content in a site that isn't Youtube. It has it's own comment and like system and everything! Worth a look, right? TILvids is a peetube powered site focusing on educational content, some of the content on there is taken (with permission) from Youtube, and the quality and such-like is the same, so it's a great way to learn stuff outside of Youtube! Vlare is (or was) a brilliant alternative to Youtube. However, it went down sometime last yeare, but the URL remains with a promise of it coming back, so I guess we should watch out for that! Probably worth mentioning VidLii as well, who were the original team behind Vlare, and it's nice to see the classic Youtube format in use again. Problem with VidLii is the video quality is dreadful, and the community isn't much better... --- Matrix is an alternative to Discord, and feels a lot less corporate and more community-driven! There are various clients for it, one I like to use is Element, but there are more out there. Archived Web --- Of course, you could explore the older web itself, and you can do that through the Wayback Machine, but there are actually dedicated browsers for it. TheOldNet.com is a web browser for Winsows & Mac (and browser) that only goes onto web archived sites, and is even compatible with Win9x! There's also Wayback Machine. "Wait, didn't you just sa-" I know what I said! However, it turns out there's a Wayback Machine app/browser for iOS and Android. It's not great, but it gets the job done! --- So what about newer, more up to date sites? Well, it turns out the smolweb never went away, it just got overshadowed by big tech, here's how you explore it. Wiby is a fantastic search engine that focuses on older (and sometimes newer) static websites. It's great to just go on it and just search for sites. The mystery of not knowing what to expect takes me back to the web 1.0 days! Definitely reccomend checking this one out! I find myself bookmarking sites I find there all the time! If you can connect a Windows 98 computer to the internet, it works on there, too! Neocities is a great throwback to GeoCities. It's a static web host and social media that encourages it's users to make wacky and unusual websites (Like mine!) I have a supporter account, where I pay £5 a month to have more storage space and multiple sites, and it's worth every penny. I love what they're doing and am very happy to support them! You can also have one site on there for free, so why not do it? You can search for GIFs to use on it on GIFCities! --- Now we're at what is known as the "Smolweb", which is a space on the internet away from the World Wide Web where geeks come together to make their own personal websites and explore! Bringing back the joy of Web 1.0! I say this consist of 3 protocols: Gopher, Gemini and Finger. The Gopher protocol, for those who don't know, was a competitior to the World Wide Web in the early 90s, and eventually lost to it, but it never fully went away. It "officially" died in 1995, but it never truly went away and has actually been growing in recent years with over 4 times as many Gopherholes (Their equivalent to websites) now as there was in 2010! How Gopher works is that you have a menu called a "Gophermap", that had items linking to various things like txt files, images, bbs boards and even HTMl files! You can also link to other gopherholes and gophermaps, but generally it's just one gophermap per directory. Launched in 2019, there's also the Gemini Protocol, which is a successor to Gopher. It's like if HTTP and Gopher had a baby. It's a lot closer to the WWW and simpler to use, and there are more sites than on Gopher, as far as I know. You can make your own GemLog (Gemini Blogs) using https://gemlog.blue/! Finger also deserves a mention here. It's a protocol that's been around since the 1970s, and they're very simple in nature. They're single page text files that people can call from a terminal or browser (if it supports it) to check the status of a person or project. It's not as advanced as the other 2, but it's pretty cool nonetheless. You can make your own Finger sites/plans on by going to https://finger.farm/! The thing about these protocols is that they're mostly text only, so they don't recreate the web aesthetically. However, they do a fantastic job with recreating the feel of the classic web, where it's mostly just personal sites, webrings (or "orbits", as they're called on Gemini), and generally tonnes of content to be discovered! These protocols are so much fun to explore! I even catch myself on my iPad just browsing the Gophersphere or Geminispace! I thourougly reccomend it! You'll need a specialised browser to explore them, and the one I use is called Kristall on Linux, which supports all 3 protocols. There are others on other platforms that I can't be bothered looking up rn, but they should be easy to find! You can, if you *really* wanted to, also find proxys to load the sites on your web browser, but I wouldn't reccomend it simply because with a dedicated browser, you aren't tempted to go anywhere on the surface/big web. --- In Conclusion, I am so happy that the web I knew and loved as a child never truly went away, and is in fact making a comeback! You can now have fun browsing about various sites on the go, in your bed and without having to pay for every hour of dial-up! It's reignited my passion for the internet and website building! As you can probably see. So I hope this web page was useful and you discovered something new and awesome! In the mean time, I'm out!