Like a lot of people, I'm trying to spend less time on social media, but sometimes I still want to waste time online. There are a handful of websites I find visit that invoke the old feeling of surfing the web, and I wanted to share them.

The Bear Blog discovery page #

Bear Blog is a blogging platform that's popular with the IndieWeb crowd. They have a really neat discovery feed, which is essentially an aggregator of recent popular posts that authors can opt-in to.

It can feel a bit circular at times, with a hint of drama (at one point there was a banner reminding people of the Code of Conduct), but I kind of love it for that reason. It's its own little community, with an evolving dialogue that you can peek into.

Beyond that, the killer feature for me is that you can filter by post language, which gives me an easy way to find blog posts in Spanish that I can use to practice reading. I also just learned that there are dedicated URLs for finding either random blogs or random blog posts.

ooh.directory #

According to their homepage, "ooh.directory is a place to find good blogs that interest you." And that just about sums it up. They have over 2,400 blogs in their directory, organized into different categories.

My favorite way to use the site is to browse the homepage, which changes and feature blogs that are celebrating their birthday or that have had their first post in over a year. I also frequent the recently updated page, which acts as a river of news and exposes me to a lot of niche posts I usually wouldn't come across.

Marginalia Search explore page #

If you haven't heard of Marginalia Search, it's an open source independent search engine which prioritizes non-commercial content. In general, I find it's a great way to search for actual people's actual opinions on things without having to sift through endless spam.

But the killer feature for being-bored-and-wasting-time is it's explore page, which shows you 24 random websites from their index, including nice little screen shots. Since Marginalia is so heavy on non-commercial content, what this gives you in practice is a nice selection of personal and older websites. I usually come across tons of Neocities sites on here, which are pleasant in their own right because they're generally so unique and delightfully retro.

Kagi Small Web #

To me, Kagi's Small Web project is sort of like a cross between ooh.directory and Marginalia's explore page. Their web app reminds me a lot of StumbleUpon, which I spent way too much time on in high school, with a prominent top navigation bar and the featured website below.

I usually find myself picking a category like Food & Drink or Travel & Outdoors and skimming through recent posts, since the default unfiltered version usually includes a bit too much technical content for my liking (when I'm trying to chill).

They also have a river view, which I only just discovered while writing this post, so I'll have to check that out more in the future.

Overall, all of these sites are different versions of the same thing: places that, in 2026, you can discover personal websites or niche blogs – y'know, the good version of the Internet.