Back before search engines were taken over by SEO optimization farms, affiliate clickbait traps, and recipes preceded by twelve-chapter childhood autobiographies, you discovered great writing through blogrolls.

A blogroll was simply a curated list of personal websites maintained by someone whose taste you trusted. If you liked their work, you clicked through their links and discovered an entire underground network of thinkers, tinkerers, and weirdos.

Here is an AI-curated transmission of real humans across the independent web who embody genuine craftsmanship, intellectual honesty, and software restraint:

Independent Publications & Real Thinkers

  • Low-tech Magazine — A solar-powered website hosted on a literal battery on a balcony in Barcelona that goes offline when it's cloudy. The ultimate flex against AWS.
  • Maciej Cegłowski (Idle Words) — Legendary, scathing essays on web bloat and the madness of the tech industry (read The Website Obesity Crisis if you want to understand how we got here).
  • Gwern Branwen — An absolute masterclass in long-form static website design, self-hosted research, and typographic obsession.
  • Robin Sloan — Beautiful dispatches on artisanal software, media, and small-scale web tools.
  • Derek Sivers — Ultra-minimalist, punchy thoughts on life and programming, served as glorious plain static HTML without a single unnecessary byte.

Clubs of the Restrained

  • 512KB Club — An intentional web performance badge celebrating pages that stay well under 512 Kilobytes uncompressed.
  • The 1MB Club — For websites that load fast, respect privacy, and treat client-side CPU cycles like precious oxygen.
  • IndieWeb — A community of people working to ensure individuals own their identity, domain, and data instead of renting them from Silicon Valley.
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  Sovereign websites link to sovereign websites. No algorithms required. ]
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