The internet is mostly filled with spam, misinformation, and people trying to sell you garbage, but there are plenty of gems in the rough. This page is for documenting the nooks and crannies of the internet that I’ve found particularly interesting, weird, or worthwhile for some reason or another.
I have a documented bias towards small, self-published, non-commercial sites. You’ll see this reflected in the links below, and I hope you’ll join me in learning to love and support these parts of the internet.
People or groups who I think are doing interesting things.
Various software/real life projects that I’ve found interesting to use or keep an eye on their development.
Mastodon: I’ve mostly abandoned commercial social media platforms in favor of the fediverse. I’ve found the communities on Mastodon to be much more wholesome and significantly less toxic to my brain, but your mileage may vary. I’m particularly fond of the people I’ve met through the community on merveilles.town. Lots of interesting people at the intersection of technology, art, veganism, and a general distaste for capitalism.
SourceHut: I’ve recently realized the irony in hosting my free/open source projects on a platform run by a megacorp (Github/Microsoft). SourceHut is the exact polar opposite and is run by Drew DeVault, someone who vehemently rejects the current domination of the internet by giant tech companies. I’m slowly but surely working on migrating my projects over to SourceHut, even though there are some design decisions that I’m not 100% sure about (namely the choice to use email patches over pull requests).
Kill The Newletter: A simple and free service for converting email newsletters to RSS feeds. Also mentioned in this blog post.
I love learning about cities, and especially how we can make them more sustainable and liveable for humans rather than cars. There seems to be a growing community of YouTube channels and discussion boards around these ideas which I am very fond of for their work in spreading the good word:
Not Just Bikes: A YouTube channel that does a much better job than I can in explaining why North American cities are sorry horribly designed and what good urban design looks like. I particularly enjoyed this video which explains why city design is so important (unfortunately at the expense of Houston).
RMTransit: This YouTube channel is for people who can’t consume enough information about trains and transit systems.
Pedestrian Observations: Alon Levy’s blog is filled with ridiculous well done analysis/insights into mass transit, especially in the successes/failures of different systems around the world. Their series on construction costs is interesting for anyone wondering why large infrastructure projects are so difficult in the US.