Web 1.0 is still out there (if you know where to look)

How a small but growing group of people keep the old internet alive in the era of slop.

6 September 2026

Somewhere along the way, like a glass of coke left out in the midday summer sunshine, the internet went flat. The fizz burnt off and left a sickly, cloying, sweetness infused with the same short videos, captioned screenshots, and identikit chumbox ragebait slop gurgling back and forth between adverts for Temu landfill, nutritionally bereft meal replacement shakes, and clips of Stephen Bartlett waffling absolute toss.

So let me ask you: when was the last time you stumbled across something totally new, or surprising, or just “surfed the web,” hopping from link to link and finding yourself down a curious rabbit hole, reading words written by real people? Chances are—depending on what kind of internet user you are¹—that it might have been a long time. The rabbit holes of yesteryear have been replaced by the battery-farmed, doomscrolling-walled-garden rabbit holes of today. The organic, free-range rabbits of yesteryear have long gone.

As someone who remembers what a dial-up modem sounds like, I am of course nostalgic for the old internet, for the Web 1.0 internet, for the real internet and, luckily, it’s still out there.

But only if you know where to look.

Welcome to FROGLAND!

Dear reader, please enjoy these websites that exist and are absolutely real:

Welcome to FROGLAND!
A German language Magnum PI fansite
A fansite for Wizardry, a (very) early roleplaying game
ASCII art hearts which perhaps needs no explanation, just… use at your own risk
infect_unix.html, a morality tale about clicking suspicious links
Froob.org: are you sure you want to click this? You’ve been warned²

The best part is I found all of these delightful html delights within minutes of one another via a single, simple website. A search engine, no less.

Wiby.me, the search engine for Web 1.0 sites

“I first got to see the internet on my friend’s computer in 1994,” says the anonymous creator of Wiby, a search engine for Web 1.0 webpages. “The first thing he showed me was a simple search engine, how you can type what you are looking for in this text field, and get a list of results of pages, then you click through those pages and find all sorts of amazing things. We didn’t find exactly what we were looking for, but it was still a lot of fun.”

Built entirely on a handful of servers at its creator’s home somewhere in Canada, Wiby only indexes websites that meet a strict set of criteria: “Pages must be simple in design. Simple HTML, non-commerical sites are preferred. Pages should not use much scripts/css for cosmetic effect.” Strict criteria indeed—most modern sites would be disqualified—but that’s the point: Wiby’s explicit purpose is to build “a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.”

Since its inception in 2017, a small group of dedicated users have been quietly submitting and indexing pages that meet this criteria. Its creator has no idea who they are, or where they find their sites for submission, but they’re submitting sites and donations all the time.

“Finding things you didn’t know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens,” laments the site’s about page. “All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn’t great at finding them.”

I asked Wiby’s creator why finding small, personalised websites like this is so important. “The web back then was not centralized around a few giant ranches as we have today, so despite being smaller, it felt infinite. Most pages were not commercial, they were made by people who had some interest they wanted to show or discuss. I’d say by 2002 the web had become saturated by commercial content. It was no longer fun to “surf” the web by that point when all you can find is ad driven and commercial content.”

Rediscovering the small web, and the people that use it

One of the delightful things about search engines like Wiby is finding people’s personal blogs. I have one of my own, and plenty before me have written about the benefits of having one. Personal blogs, typically ones developed by their own authors, are part of the broader “small web.”

Many of the sites on the small web are personal blogs, and one such blog I found (again, via Wiby) is run by Chris Covell, an English teacher based in Japan, who has run his site since the nineties. To have a personal website seemed, to Chris, “like a normal extension of one’s self-expression in the 1990s, so I was happy to put up my writing, poetry, artwork, photographs, and hobbyist gushings, and have it visible to anybody in the world who might be interested.”

“I’ve received e-mails over many years from online folks who appreciated some section of my site, or who use it as a reference for game release data, or some technical/programming thing; and this appreciation is mainly why I keep my website up. It motivates me to keep it available for whatever reason a person has to access it.”

At a time when so much internet use is passive—watching, consuming, scrolling, without putting any “content” out there—emailing people you don’t know via their website, or being emailed because you have a website feels like an idea from a bygone era, like handwritten letters. But just like receiving letters in real life, there’s a certain delight in getting the occasional email from a real person. Having run my own site for some time and having received plenty of my own, I can say it’s never not at least interesting.

Homesteading on the small web in the time of AI

Today’s internet feels, to me and many others, incredibly atomised. It seems like most people, most of the time, are tucked up inside their own personalised algorithmic suggestions. The TikToks, Reels, and Shorts they watch, the threads, tweets, and skeets they see, the streams they join, the subreddits they browse, the discord servers they frequent—there’s a lot of places to be, and all of them are small, all of them are insular.

But what, if anything, should we expect the internet to do for us? To bring things to us on a plate, so that we can be interested and amused by them? This trains us for passivity. No, the internet of agency that has always existed continues to do so, as projects like Wiby and Maginalia and the wonderful small sites and blogs that are still out there are evidence of.

Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that all the things that once made the internet fun, and new, and interesting, and novel, are all still there. You just have to bother to go and find out, and then get involved for no other reason other than it’s fun, or interesting, or just because.

A visit to Sandy’s CyberHome

I asked Wiby’s creator if they have a favourite site that they’ve found through their own search engine. “Sadly a large number of them have expired, which is a real tragedy. But Sandy’s CyberHome has to be one of my favorites. Make sure to play the sublime music while you visit, and take in the grandeur.”

Reader: I did indeed play the music and, truly, it was indeed sublime. And maybe that’s what I love so much about these old sites, about the Web 1.0 we knew, and that we can still know: there’s more than enough room for some whimsy, some personal expression, some individuality. Why? No reason. Just because we want to.