How to Discover Independent Websites

Hey everyone, today I had a fun interaction with a fellow web developer regarding the discovery of independent websites and blogs.

In the /r/frontend subreddit, a writer named Fred shared a blog post titled "Small web is beautiful". One of the things he said which caught my attention was this:

I dream of a web that fosters healthy conversations, together with personal and intellectual growth. The world is diverse and fascinating, and we can be information explorers together. Whenever I write a longform blog post and share it with the world, I get people recommending me similar reads, which in turn I use to improve the original blog post (and my own personal knowledge). I love it when people challenge my ideas — as that opens my mind to unseen perspectives — and I wish the web was a safe place where this could happen much more often.

Which is pretty much what I love about the web as a medium for communication in the first place!

I left a comment on his blog post saying that the best and most meaningful connections I’ve made on the web have been through finding small independent websites owned by people and emailing them to say hello and thank you if an article was especially helpful or insightful. I also mentioned that I'm a big fan of smallweb search engines and directories like we had back in the day, so he asked me for recommendations.

I ended up writing a blog post on my website collecting some of my favorites and sending the post to him. He looked through my site and saw some of my interests in writing and literature so he sent me a project of his where he's collecting book epigraphs from various authors. Now, here's the fun part: turns out that when he started this project, he had shared and asked for help with the Ruby on Rails community (about 9 months ago) and I had already commented and given feedback on the project! Full circle moment reminding me how small the internet can be 😁