Web Discovery
Entrypoints to the authentic web
If you’re here, we hope you’ve checked out Explore or its more orderly cousin Explore Sorted. There are a few other great indieweb discovery projects, here are some of our favorites:
| Site | Type(s) |
|---|---|
| Cloudhiker | Blogstumbler with categories |
| The Forest | Blogstumbler |
| Indieblog.page | Blogstumbler, feed |
| Indieseek.xyz | Link site |
| Kagi Smallweb | Feed |
| Marginalia Search | Search, blogstumbler |
| Ooh.directory | Link site, feed |
| People and Blogs | Feed |
| Scour.ing | Customizable feed |
| Wiby | Search |
Posts about web entrypoints
- A look at search engines with their own indexes has a list small web search projects with helpful commentary 🪐
- Notes on the “indieweb” #2: Where do I find things to read? discusses RSS, newsletters, and microblogs 🪐
- How I Discover New Blogs lists a variety of indieweb discovery sites 🪐
- /g/’s based sites contains a categorized list of alternative search engines and other points of interest
A few blog posts about the web
- In Praise of Links (2025) 🪐
- My IndieWeb Journey: Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence. (2025) 🪐
- The IndieWeb’s next stage? (2024) 🪐
- We Need to Bring Back Webrings (2023) 🪐
- What happened to blogging for the hell of it? (2023) 🪐
- A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox (2022) 🪐
- Some thoughts on walled gardens (2022)
- The IndieWeb for Everyone (2022) 🪐
- The IndieWeb Mixed Bag (2021) 🪐
- The small web is beautiful (2021) 🪐
- The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021) 🪐
- The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (2019) 🪐
- An Introduction to the IndieWeb (2017) 🪐
- How the Blog Broke the Web (2017) 🪐
- Indie Web (2015) 🪐
- Why the Indie Web movement is so important (2014) 🪐
- The Slow Web (2012) 🪐
On the replacement of independent websites by social media:
Those who would give up essential liberty to decide whom to follow, for getting a little temporary convenience in exchange, deserve neither to choose what to read nor convenience - adiian
Exploration mode
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We created the Outer Web to help web contributors find and link each other and, in doing so, created a large (and growing) galaxy of webpages.
There are a lot of great things that can be done with this data and one of those things is Exploration Mode. It’s exactly as it sounds: an interface for exploring webpages indexed by the Outer Web. Since we organize content by similarity, if you’re viewing a page about sci-fi interfaces, your exploration options will be topically similar.
Explore mode has a thematic UI but is nonetheless straightforward: clicking on planets (/asteroids/comets) takes you around our index, the text blurbs link to the offsite page content.
The parsec distance is a real measure of (dis)similarity, for most queries we show a fourth result that is numerous hops away.
Start exploring
- For casual browsing, the Explore link takes you to a list of categories will send you to some related posts.
- If you're using Navicomputer, you can jump into explore mode from any of the results.
How to link the web using Navicomputer
If you’re a blogger or web publisher and see interesting links in Navicomputer search results, consider adding those links to your own content. For example, here are some results from the text of our about page displayed as a table of external links:
Links similar to our about page
 | How to build a place on the web where you can own your identity, control your content and create whatever the hell you like. |
 | The indieweb is all the rage, especially as we saw the large social media conglomerates, that once replaced it, start to crack. But what is the indieweb? And how do you get there? All this, and more, in this blogpost (on the indieweb I guess). The indieweb - a web of good intentions The indieweb describes the web of personal blogs, homepages about special interests made with love, and handcrafted personal web presences. |
 | Overview of different techniques to implement comments using a static site generator. |
Another example…
Links similar to a made-up post about exploring the edge of the solar system
 | New Horizons may safe to continue exploring the Kuiper Belt -- according to a recent NASA announcement. The devil is in the details. |
 | A little-known proposal is threatening the future of NASAs New Horizons mission , and for reasons unknown, the space press has not reported on this development whatsoever. This needs to change, as the public has the right to know that one of this countrys most successful planetary... |
 | As I mentioned a few weeks back , I did a second podcast for 365daysofastronomy.org , and it's available today. It's called "JPL's Greatest... |