Originally posted 2026-03-02
I’ve been increasingly seeing mentions of the indie web recently. The idea of going back to linked personal websites, like the good ol days. In a way, this notes site is my main personal website these days. I do have my main Yernemm Site, but it’s mostly used as a landing page at the moment.
Although, I did want to try out some of these indie web hosts. One cool thing they do is that they provide a way to browse other people’s websites via tags and titles, etc. Makes it easier to discover interesting personal sites. The main ones I’ve tried are Neocities and Nekoweb. Whilst Neocities has higher limits in its free tier, it blocks external data requests unless you pay for hosting. I wanted to implement a Bluesky feed which just completely broke on Neocities so I mainly switched over to Nekoweb. It has some cool features, like a web code editor, multiplayer mouse cursors on the main website, and the free tier does not block external data requests. The downside is that your storage limits are significantly lower but I have other web servers that I can use for hosting larger files so that’s not a big issue for me.
I am still working on them, and ultimately I will probably make my Neocities redirect to my Nekoweb or something like that. But they’re up for now over at yernemm.neocities.org and yernemm.nekoweb.org.
It’s kinda nice to just use raw HTML/JS/CSS for these. I’m so used to working with web frameworks that it’s pretty refreshing to go back to the basics again.
One thing I do sometimes when I am really bored but have access to a computer is open up notepad and start making an interactive web page. Usually it ends up being some kind of random scribble generator made with a HTML canvas. I might see if I can dig out some of these I have saved and upload them to one of these indie web sites. They’re not useful or particularly interesting but I do like the idea of just having a scrappy website that I can throw random HTML things into without caring about quality or mobile support, etc.
I do sorta kinda hope this takes off more. I’ve been browsing other people’s websites and some people have some impressive web skills these days. I almost feels like a near-forgotten art form, I’m certainly not patient enough to make something like ESPY.WORLD.
I feel like we are starting to see a shift away from big centralised social medias to more open or personal alternatives. Maybe not for everyone, maybe not for the vast majority, but certainly for an increasing number of people. It does feel like such a change is needed. I have personally switched pretty much entirely to Bluesky a long time ago. I’ve also been looking into some Discord alternatives due to recent events, although I don’t think many of them are quite there yet. Though personal websites are step further than this, moving entirely away from platforms to web hosts provides full control of your online presence. I personally don’t plan to stop using social medias, and I doubt that even those more committed to the shift would, but it’s certainly a nice direction to move in.
I have no idea what to put on my websites for the most part, but in the spirit of the indie web, here’s some cool websites I’ve bookmarked so far: