Website tree and curation of our internet experience

In the past week, I have stumbled into two separate blog posts about the same thing: how it feels like finding interesting websites has become harder, and we let the algorithms curate the internet for us. The first of the posts mentioned was in the Hacker Newsletter, and Aaron Jorbin shared the latter.

Those posts hit home for two reasons;

1) During my teenage years, internet freedom was a big thing. I was active on the Pirate Party of Finland, followed Electronic Frontier Finland closely, and joined Sange Coop. All the brilliant, smart individuals in these groups have influenced my worldview in which transparency, equality, open source, freedom of information, digital rights, and owning your data are highly valued.

2) Twitte… sorry. X, being the dumpster fire it is, made me leave it already a while ago. After leaving it, I noticed how nice life is without constant disputes and sometimes overwhelming negativity. I joined both Mastodon and Bluesky quite early but haven’t been active because social media does not feel exciting anymore. Reading long-form articles and posts has always been my thing, as you get more background and deeper thoughts out of those. That’s why, instead of any social media, nowadays, I mainly follow good old RSS feeds with Feedly.

So, inspired by both blog posts, I created a Website tree. In the tree, I plan on listing some of my favorite blogs, websites, aggregators, and tools. It’s my small contribution to help others find new interesting corners around the internet and push them into the rabbit hole of exploring other websites.

I suggest you to do the same.

Oh, and start a personal open indexable blog instead of publishing those pesky LinkedIn articles.

Let’s start getting our internet back, piece by piece, from the algorithms and make it more bazaar-like instead of big malls. Which reminded me, I should write about why I hate big shopping malls from human and urban planning perspective…

Until next time!