What are your favourite lesser known websites?
I want to see if I can get a spark of the "old internet" back by making a starting page for myself with all kinds of cool websites. But not sure where to start because Google obviously will not work for this.
So... what are some of your favourite websites?
neal.fun definitely deserves a mention.
These games also have a similar feel:
Paper Trader
Guess The Year
Welp, already spent way too much time on neal.fun! Great stuff!
Got a few:
https://everynoise.com/ You can find A LOT of music genres here. Genres next to eachother resemble one another. Figure out what you like, and what genres are close to it. Clicking on the >> will take you to artists in this genre, or search for artists in the upper right corner and see what genre they fall under.
https://clickclickclick.click This one is about privacy, see what a browser can track. If you don't know much about pixeltracking, this one is a fun way to learn (and a little creepy hehe)
https://suno.com/create Create your own songs with an AI, just throw in lyrics, a genre, and you are done. A fun way to troll a friend by throwing in an old conversation
https://darknetdiaries.com/ Haven't looked into this one myself, but these are true stories on the darknet, recommended by a friend of mine.
Came here to post EveryNoise. Absolutely incredible site that just fucking WORKS. Can't believe I went as long as I did without knowing about it.
It's interesting. Some seriously fragmented genre names. Not sure I agree with many of them, but I always like new music discovery tools.
Darknet Diaries is a podcast, rather than just a website. It’s not all about the darknet, he does tons of stories about internet security and penetration testing.
I have listened to every single episode. It’s EXCELLENT.
Thanks for the links, they're interesting.
Clickclickclick is such a great eye opener. And I'll definately will spend some time searching artists I like on Everynoise. Other two also added to my bookmarks for later viewing. Great links!
Enjoy!
I don't know if it's "lesser known" but I discovered boardgamearena.com last year and I've been addicted ever since.
It's free, but there is a premium membership that gives some extra perks.
Hundreds of boardgames that you can play with others online, from rummy and checkers to Wingspan and Catan.
They offer casual matchmaking and ranked competitive modes and tournaments.
Set up an account and invite me to your favorite game! I would love to learn it! You can figure out my username on there.
BGA is fantastic. Free game selection is always growing. Membership, if you want to pay for the premium games, is a fantastic deal. Only one person in your playgroup needs a membership for everyone to play. The interface for most games is WAY better than actually playing in person and games are so much faster too. It's not as good as hanging out in person with friends, but it's damn close.
Boardgame Arena is a great site indeed!
I like single purpose concept websites that don't do anything. They're the opposite of the modern internet that values engagement above all. They communicate exactly one thing once and though you never have to go back, you're always glad that they're there.
Feel like you are really under selling all that zombo can do
Anything is possible... At Zombo com
So true! I hereby retract that antizombo slander
It’s not what zombocom can do, it’s what you can do at zombocom.
Zombo is great. In the 10 minutes I spent there I hung the laundry, bought weekly groceries, painted my living room, got married twice, got elected minister of foreign affairs of Belgium, made first contact with 4 different alien spaces and then evolved into a whole new life form that exists in 4d space. Good site.
I like single purpose concept websites that don’t do anything.
Aye matey.
Excellent thank you very much for this.
I am a now Junior Acolyte follower of the pug
Big ytmnd vibes
I'm amazed zombo still exists
When Flash died the site was down for several days. It was nerve wracking not knowing if it would return!
I agree, I love when a site is focused.
Like I said in another comment, got some big YourTheManNowDog vibes from these. Used to browse their random site visitor a lot back in the day.
Also, love how yyyyyyy seems to be a randomized site.
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/
When I discovered this website, I started obsessively relacing all my shoes.
That secure shoelace knot was an actual game changer. Shit just works.
I feel insecure about my current shoelaces now.
Archive.org has many facets:
Wayback Machine
Internet Arcade
Feature Films
NASA Images
Multiple Image collections
Live Music Archive
Free Audiobook Collection
Open Library
American Libraries
How stuff works is amazing.
Wikipedia should not need to be mentioned.
All great and valuable links. Thanks! Archive has so many usecases. I recently used it to get some design inspiration for old 50's and 60's catalogs and magazines. Plenty of retro and vintage stuff to find! GifCities from the Archive.org team is also great :)
It's a pretty simple concept with a lot of references, but Floor796 is fun to browse around when I'm bored. There's a few interactive bits too, if you can find them.
What do you call these? Feel like I've seen this animated and printed a bunch of times in my life.
As far as art style goes, I'm not sure to be honest. Based on the artist's YouTube page of their drawing process, it seems akin to making something in Paint.
In general, I guess you could call it slice of life? iirc the "floor" is supposed to be on a spaceship, just showing the day to day activities.
The still image variety are wimmelbilder.
Frontend link to the sub on the old site.
Wiby, particularly the "surprise me" option is great for old school sites and that StumbleUpon feeling!
Ooh, that's some old school stuff!
It is far from lesser known, but my favorite standalone site is still Atlas Obscura.
If you want an excuse to visit random coordinates around you geohashing.site is a interesting option. Each day everyone is given the same set of spots to go to, with optional challenges and badges one can do. Its quite surprising how strong the community has been going despite it's age.
Futility Closet is a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible.
Here's one of my long time favorites:
What a treasure trove! At first glance I love all the ASCII art. But some of the texts feel like you're browsing some old Reddit/4chan posts. Will take me a while to get through all the gems!
I am really happy that you appreciate it. There is so much to explore there, be careful because it's easy to lose a lot of time browsing the files. Lol
I love reading about all the old school hacking and shit. There's some genuine 'anarchist cookbook' type of stuff in there. Probably don't try any of that shit, but it's fun to read about none the less.
I miss old StumbleUpon! It was great for this. Someone recently introduced me to Flashpoint Archive and I have a hunch that there's a bunch of good stuff there.
Ooh yeah, the Flashpoint Archive is an amazing resource! I've dabbled in it before. Great blast from the past!
https://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates
Use it to see how new monitors are doing. Mostly a toy but I like it.
Aww, the site says that Linux doesn't support Vsync :( Useful for my Windows install though!
Blue's News - Video Gaming, Technology and General Interest. I think it's been around since the mid 90s.
Added to my rss feeds thanks!
It's a map site that helps you identify places around the world. Google maps is so commerce-focussed, Open Street Map often lacks an explanation of what something is.
But it clearly has issues such as not licensing the background options so it has watermarks and popups.
Opentripmap.com is similar, but is probably just OSM data.
Wikimapia is great for "what's that wierd marking in the desert"-type questions.
This question reminded me of 27b/6, a website with a collections of essays and email exchanges from the author that are like humourous, satirical and based on his life. I had a lot of fun reading them years ago and I remember that it was dormant for a while but coming back it seems to have new material.
Oh god, I totally forgot about that one. I loved it. The content still seems to be great, too. Nice.
Seat61.com is a must read if you plan on taking the train.
Practical: ohmslaw.eu
Fun: murderousmaths.co.uk, htwins.net
I couldn't think of many less visited sites I usually go to often, but coalregion(dot)com is an interesting site I found using this Wiby search engine a long time ago. It's a site about a region in Pennsylvania. They have a section for recipes supposedly from that region along with a section for words/slang from that regions past. They got other things, but the dictionary and recipes interest me more than the other parts.
yucata.de is an online-play boardgame website.
Fully DIY and community built site. Free accounts and free play, although donations are accepted.
Fun small games to start with:
Port Royal, Mountain Goats, Spexxx, Ali Baba, Balloon Cup, Dragonheart, Rose King, Pompeii.
And some quality bigger games:
Bruges, Innovation, Targi, Chakra, Stone Age, Grand Austria Hotel, Imhotep, Finca, Carcassonne South Seas, Thurn & Taxis.
She's gone Ralf, she's gone. Let her go.
I felt that in my soul.
Vimm's Lair
Z2
A bunch of webcomics
Whoa, Vimm's lair is amazing! I especially like that they also have scans of manuals from old games. I'm still missing some in my collection.
Z2 is kind of hard to find with Google. Do you mean z2comics?
Thought it was z2.org but it's actually http://zzt.org
https://rabbit-rabbit.quest/ selects a random location for you to visit every day within walking/cycling distance.
'old internet' ?
RUP is totally sweet.
Someone on Lemmy posted a link to https://corru.observer a week or two ago, and I'm really enjoying the game.
sci-news.com is pretty great for science news from a wide variety of fields.
Metafilter is a wonderful weblog, and I also read Canlii, which is a legal case website which is a wonderful rabbit hole to fall down to learn about how legal decisions are made.
Used to be thefuckinghomepage but they recently stopped updating
Since people are posting games, I'll throw in Realms of Despair
do you know how the leveling gain works? do dwarves with thei less than one level slower than elves with more than one. im thinking its the opposite maybe as ones that are more than one seem to have more special things.
I never really paid attention to the level gain ratio. I'd look here for that kind of question.
This site used to be my go to for news and technology updates.
I consider it to be the front page of all front pages.
Great for a lot of things, but mostly for when you've royally messed up something like a proxy or certificate chain lol.
Someone else already mentioned wiby.me, so here's something else:
I have no fucking clue what this site is. I feel like it's a catalog for some Eldritch business, and that I could order literally anything I wanted from it if I could just figure out how to use it.
I don't know what I'm looking at and I'm loving it.
It's like if the Craigslist guy was like "You know what, I think I'm going to open my own outdoor store". I like the little link to the page about his car. No bragging, no showing off... just a "Hey, this is my car. These are it's specifications. Check it out."
Could probably buy something from the site, and request the owner sell it to you only after going out for a beer together, and it'd probably work.
This text-based game is fun:
https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/
In the same vibe, the excellent arcanum: https://mathiashjelm.gitlab.io/arcanum/
Oh goodness... Why did you have to introduce me to a clicker game?. Welp, I guess I'll cancel all my appointments for the next few days.
I'm not sure if they're still around, but PostSecret and the Internet K-Hole were sites you could spend hours on.
Whoah, Internet K-Hole is so cool! I love random older photographs. Good stuff! PostSecret seems interesting too!
Found two sound/music generating websites (before AI music was cool):
Patapap. This one also has some other interesting sites in it's footer (on desktop)
Hah, cool. Kind of like a small community version of DeviantArt. I dig it!
I, too, wistfully long for the days of memepool.
