< the skull

THE WEB WE LOST
===============
2026-05-10

In the beginning, the indieweb felt strange to me.

I was used to the websites and services of large companies. Until then, the
furthest I had dared to venture into decentralization was something involving
blockchains. But there was something inevitably robotic about all of it. It felt
almost like eating canned food: it feeds you, it does its job, but you know it
is not natural. That was the feeling I had toward big tech.

The first time I accessed the internet must have been sometime between 1994 and
1996. Back then, the internet was still a strange concept to me. I was a child
already fascinated by computers, and my favorite games were Duke Nukem, Doom —
my parents had no idea what that was, thankfully — encyclopedia games, and those
CD-ROMs that came bundled with magazines.

And none of that made the experience any less exciting. Quite the opposite. The
internet had opened an entire ocean of possibilities.

In my city, I used a US Robotics modem, probably something around 32 kbps —
which, obviously, was never actually delivered in full. I remember that the
first messenger I used was ICQ. Later, around 1999, with the arrival of BRASNet,
one of the largest IRC networks of the time, I eventually migrated to IRC.

My first websites could not have been anything else: they were hosted on CJB.net
and GeoCities, already under the shadow of the Yahoo! megacorporation. And just
like mine, there were thousands of others. They were personalized, deeply
imperfect websites, but they carried the face of their creators. Mine, in
particular, had several dancing skulls scattered across the screen and a pile of
nonsense aimed at horror and terror fans.

It is curious to think that Netflix had already existed for two years when I
finally published my first website — not, of course, in the form we know today.

But then everyday life knocks at the door. Chores arrive. Responsibilities pile
up. And we become lazy.

I think a large part of Google’s power was born precisely from the laziness of
the average user: the promise of making easy what perhaps should have remained
the bare minimum required effort. By around 2010, the large companies had
already taken their definitive shape. They buried services, standardized
experiences, and turned the person who once had a highly customizable website
into just another numbered user.

We became standardized numbers inside big tech.

I stopped being Pablo and became user\_some\_random\_number. At least in support
tickets, that was how I was identified: by a number.

That was what led me to my first real search: what was left of the internet that
did not share Google’s algorithm?

I confess I used Perplexity to escape those algorithms a little. At the time, I
still did not know Kagi.

The AI listed fifty websites for me. The first was Space Jam, that wonderfully
deranged website from 1996. Then came many others.

And with every site I opened, there was a discovery. There was a feeling.
Something I could no longer easily find out there.

I began researching more. I started stumbling upon services like Neocities, with
its endless customizations, crooked ideas, homegrown frameworks, and tiny
personal obsessions. And that feeling kept expanding. Something I had never
truly valued before began to take shape inside my chest.

It was the fediverse.

One thing led to another, but I will unpack that slowly.

My first experiment was Weirdnet:

https://weirdnet.org [1]

The idea was simple. I wanted to find a way to gather as many links as possible
in one place. Not exactly a search engine, but something curated, chosen by hand
— or, at the very least, scraped from trustworthy sources. That was how Links
and Directory were born:

https://links.weirdnet.org [2]

I started with around thirty links. Little by little, it grew. Today, I
genuinely consider it an excellent collection. I have countless links gathered
there, but I still felt unsatisfied. I wanted to extract more. I wanted to find
communities.

And the more I searched, the more interested I became.

Man, Neocities websites gave me a good feeling. They were full of handmade
artifacts, built with few resources, but loaded with intention. And then, out of
nowhere, I stumbled upon tildes. I was impressed to find pubnixes alive and well
in 2025. I got excited and sent in my application — to which, unfortunately, I
never received a proper response.

Then, as tends to happen in these labyrinths of the internet, from tildes I
stumbled into omg.lol. And it was love at first sight.

At first, I did not have time to explore everything. But there was a similar
logic there: identity, community, simplicity, presence. Some time later, I
remembered my registration and returned. And, in truth, I found there the best
community — and by far the most welcoming one. That was where I decided to stay.

The fact is, without dragging this out too much, there is an entire
decentralized world out there waiting for new explorers and creators. The world
does not revolve around big tech — nor should it. You should have custody of
your own data. You should be the maintainer of your own infrastructure, as it
was in the beginning.

Unfortunately, we live in a society too lazy to create and too obedient to
question. But maybe that is exactly why the indieweb still feels so alive:
because within it there is still friction, imperfection, authorship, and human
presence.

And today, that is worth gold.

Links:
  [1] https://weirdnet.org
  [2] https://links.weirdnet.org


< the skull