Take a look over at https://piefed.social/f/smallweb
Neocities has a fun collection as well.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Asklemmy
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They're not all gone. I own an online community that I have been running since 2001. The only changes I've made was a redesign to make the site responsive to all screens. They're out there.
what is it?
All the forums I was on aren't really active anymore as the user base changed substantially and admins changed. I miss the forum days. 90% helpful and only 10% BS. Now it's the opposite on social media.
Not all forums are ghost towns. Maybe the ones you went to years ago but active ones are still out there, just keep looking.
Maybe I'll go looking for some again since lemmy doesn't have many subs I can relate to and don't have any new content for weeks.
What specifically cant you find on lemmy?? I've been able to find almost everything im interested in here. If not, make your own instance ! Thats how we grow
The communities exist, but there are no people in them. 1 person per month active is not a community. So most of the communties even on lemmy.world are barren. It's pretty much just politics, memes, and linux stuff that stays active enough to be interesting.
Yeah Lemmy sort of sucks tbh.
No, they're still here, Google/Bing just don't prioritize the old web style websites that don't have trackers and don't have mobile friendly designs.
You can find these old style sites with Marginalia a search engine for the ''small, old and weird web'.
There's also an explore section if you don't know what to search for.
So many people have brought up Neocities ( modern day Geocities ) and I absolutely agree it's an amazing site to find non-corporate and non-monetized to death sites made by random people across the globe. Definitely worth looking around there to see what others have built over time.
As for forums, I wasn't really on that side of the internet, so no clue.
Check out ProtoWeb! It's kind of like a more advanced implementation of the Wayback Machine.
I've having tons of fun with it recently, just bouncing around random old websites
... like in the time before insta/fb/reddit/lemmy doomscrolling.
stay away from instagram, facebook, reddit and the capitalist lemmy instances and the doomscrolling will become a thing of the past.
All the old websites I liked turned into for-profit monstrosities, then got bought out, gutted, and shut down. π₯Ί
Neopets is still around. Monetized to hell, but still...
Neocities is treasure trove of personal websites built by people of all ages. Super sick designs. If you're into replacing your social media doomscrolling with some blog reading get an RSS reader set up and add some sites. PowRSS.com is a nice place to start as an aggregator of feeds and discovery tool
I love books. And this basement is a true treasure trove.
Thank you ππΌ You've given me a new go-to nighttime need-to-stare-at-my-screen-until-my-eyes-burn-and-fall-asleep pastime. I enjoyed cloudhiker last night and it felt a million times less psychologically damaging than the toxic waste of reddit-facebook-instagram-twitter all which I've despised for years...and I still love Lemmy but requires too much thinking & participation when I'm exhausted at the end of the day and falling asleep π΄ Now it's 3am and I feel another nap coming on...π΄
neocities
Other replies have listed a lot of them, and there are plenty more. Lots of webrings for personal sites are still running. Plenty of BBS-style forums too.
The bottom line is, there are plenty of other people who enjoy those aspects of older websites, whether for nostalgic aesthetic reasons or for the benefits of minimalist design. So there are many new sites being made in the same vein of twenty and thirty year old sites. Just like Lemmy is a breath of fresh air for those who are only used to having ads shoved down their throats, old-style sites can be surprisingly relaxing and refreshing.
My friends laugh at me for being a million years old but I say web design now can be utter shit and fatiguing. I prefer the simplistic old designs. There was nothing wrong with it.
Check out Wiby - its a search engine for old-looking internet pages
For just the old website aesthetics I recommend Japanese websites, I looked at the website of UTAU and laughed out loud just because of the nostalgic feel, as well as me not knowing Japanese and thus the site being sorta indecipherable.
Baths are nice :3
you need an http:// at the beginning; otherwise current browsers try to open it with https, which throws an error because old sites generally didn't provide security certificates
I like hanging out on Wolfhome.com - it's a graphical chat site that's been running near continuously since 1999. The code/UI is a bit dated but there's a nice group of folks there.
Go to the fediring, and start exploring! The 8831 will be your guides. They have been expecting you.
strangely, GaiaOnline is still going and the majority of its users are millennials and zoomers. it has the same functionality as it did 20 years ago lmao. itβs very active.
i donβt know of many other communities from that period currently operational.
Remember their mmo?
vaguely, wow lol. i was NEVER interested in any of what they were doing. i didnβt even spend my money on cards for points. i just liked the forums and dressing up.
Use the kagi small web search!!there is a TON out there still!!
Also nethack.org is still going strong with IRC chat and game servers. I logged into my account after 8 years and it was exactly how I left it.
I installed gopher on a whim recently on a linux box and was surprised by the amount of recent activity. Felt like I was back in the early 90s
Oo I need to check this out again. Surprised its active
They're not gone, largely, but they're a drop in the ocean now.
I'm on a forum! If you're interested, it's called anarcho-punk.net
You might like neocities.org
I think some of them can be accessed with a few Wikipedia searches and looking at links (not the archived ones). The internet is still really cool check out the links at !coolwebsites@lemmy.ca or !web@lemmy.ml
There are a lot of people who still keep blogs. HackerNews is alright for finding interesting blog posts if you like reading about tech subjects. Could also just read the news. marxists.org, libcom.org, and various smaller websites for archiving communist literature also exist. Generally there's always a lot of "small web"/non-corporate web reading material out there.