Finding the Small Web in a Loud Internet
My daily reading is deliberate at this point. I’ve settled on a small set of tools that surface the kind of internet I actually want, rather than whatever’s performing well today.
Hacker News
I use hcker.news rather than the main site, mainly to filter down to “smallweb” content and sort chronologically by submission time rather than by rank. The default HN front page surfaces whatever has caught fire in the last few hours, which can feel samey. Sorting by submission time means I catch things before they’ve either exploded or quietly disappeared.
The content I’m actually after is build logs, DIY projects, and obscure deep dives, the kind of thing where someone has spent months on a strange project and written it all up. The discussion threads are often as good as the links themselves.
On mobile I use RedReader, mostly anonymously. It’s fast, strips away the cruft, and doesn’t nag me to sign in every five minutes.
On desktop I use old.reddit.com to read threads and occasionally join in. New Reddit is too noisy and too slow. The communities I keep coming back to are around 3D printing, ClockworkPi devices, and handheld SBC gaming, a pretty consistent theme of small computers and making things.
Blogs via powRSS
I don’t use an RSS reader. The idea of an inbox full of unread posts is too much like work. powRSS sidesteps that entirely. It’s a timeline of blog posts skewing heavily towards indie and personal sites, something you dip into rather than clear. The content is much the same as what I find on hcker.news: build logs, deep dives, personal projects. It has three modes: a regular feed of recent posts, a shuffle mode that surfaces posts regardless of age (blogs going back to 1995 are fair game), and a random mode that sends you somewhere completely different on every click. That last one in particular captures something that felt lost when algorithmic feeds took over, that sense of not knowing what you’re about to read.
YouTube
Probably more YouTube than I’d like to admit. I’ve made peace with it, but with caveats. Shorts are an abomination and I avoid them entirely.
What I actually want from YouTube is the opposite: long-form stuff, hour-plus deep dives, video essays. A lot of it I’ll have running in the background while I’m working, treating it more like a podcast than something I sit down to watch. Most of the channels I follow also have podcast feeds, and I’ll happily take either.
Actually reading things
For heavier news and tech sites loaded with ads, Chrome’s Reader Mode has become a quiet habit. It strips the page back to just the text, which is a significant improvement on sites that have clearly optimised for everything except reading.
Sharing what I find
Anything I find interesting, I tend to share on social.omgmog.net (a Known site I’ve been running since 2022), which is syndicated to Mastodon. Sometimes it’s just a link, sometimes with a comment. It’s an easy way to keep a record of things that caught my attention, somewhere between a bookmark and a blog post.