Leading question
What does it mean to have your own personal space on the internet? What fits the bill?
I came across an event from the National Library Board about crafting a handmade web and signed up for it. In preparation for that chat, I decided to go down a rabbit hole behind one of the speakers’ Are.na pages — and as I dive deeper, the clearer the idea of a personal internet spoke out to me.
I’m particularly drawn to one of the websites in her collection: A Website is a Room. It acts as a directory that points to other sites that contains some quality of “slowness, quiet, and/or gathering”. So is a personal internet one that contains soul?
A personal internet has been in my circle for a while already, and I’ve even written a bit about it (found it only in Jan 2026 after re-reading my blog posts)! Maybe 2026 is the year when I learn more about what a personal internet can look like — and create that own space I’ve craved for so long on my own.
Plesionyms of a personal internet
This video about the indie web (a “part two” of a previous video on the web revival) suggests the existence of several terms that more or less fit synonymously with the idea of a personal internet, but at the same time are each slightly different in what they resemble:
- While there’s no explicit definition from an authoritative source of truth, the web revival can mean a wider internet-based movement that puts humanity, creativity, and equality as values in the face of rapid digitalisation and clustering. In my own words, I think it’s the rejection that the social aspect of the internet must necessarily be centralised around the popular social media platforms we use daily (e.g. Instagram, X, TikTok).
- IndieWeb (capital “I” and “W”) is community of independent and personal websites, serving as a people-focused alternative to the corporate web. The community emphasises ten (plus one) principles of building on the open web. The video above mentions that this community likely made popular the term “indie web”, but is not the sole and only implementation of it.
- The indie web (lowercased, spaces) is the undefined term of a web that’s created by people. Everything about a personal internet fits in the context of an indie web, because it’s independent — made by people to be seen by other people.
Good places to start
Inspiration
Some resources I’ve came across that has this “personal internet” vibe. Great if you’d love to go down a rabbit hole:
- ooh.directory
- Blogroll
- Onio.Club (and their YouTube channel!)
- Neocities
- Winbows
- Jacky Zhao’s site, which has always been a deeply intriguing personal “north star” that led me to exploring the personal internet deeper
- See An Internet Directory for more!
Technical resources
Some help I’ve found that helps to implement the personal internet on a technical level:
- The Webmention protocol, developed by IndieWeb to power conversations and interactions across the web
Some dissonances to answer
- Most, if not all, of what I’ve seen in the personal internet seems to mimic the style of a ’90s to ’00s internet. Do we have to follow this aesthetic if we want to “fit in”? How did this aesthetic come to be in this space?
Discussions from Beyond Text: The Handmade Web: Reclaiming Digital Spaces
The discussions have moved over to its own separate note — have a look!