There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion. It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Even if you do not particularly care for becoming the next big thing, it’s still discouraging to put work into a website and get next to no traffic beyond the usual bots.

TL;DR: link to sites. link to communities. don’t just post content, but more importantly make people aware that the community exists.

if you post 10 articles but nobody knows that the community exists, that’s worth less than if you only post 5 articles but 3 people read them.

link to communities that interest you in places where people might want to know about them. sticker some link on your irl shared gardening project. maybe to slrpnk.net or sth. Sticker the links to 3 tinkering/DIY communities on your local bike repair shop.

Links are as important as streets are to traffic. They get us from A to B. don’t underbuild them.

      • BlindFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        3 days ago

        Stumbleupon was the best.

        Took me to a site once, where a person would write out what they’re dealing with, and a random other person would send them an existing song. I assume it was all anonymous.

        Like this one person posted about dealing with a horrible aunt, and I sent back Jonathan Coulton’s “Someone is Crazy”

    • Auster@thebrainbin.org
      1·
      2 days ago

      Going by wording, sounds like what Piefed and Bluesky do? A bundle of communities/profiles by common interest?

      • Panda@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        It’s like phone books were for phone numbers. A categorised directory that allowed you to easily find the types of websites you were interested in.

      • Auster@thebrainbin.org
        21·
        2 days ago

        Asked some AI, and appears to be that, though please correct me if I’m wrong.

        But going by that, starting from the fediverse, maybe people could try to make a trend like “My Web Directory” / #MyWebDirectory, where he/she posts a list of recommended small sites? On microblog platforms, usually they seem to allow users to have pinned posts, and on threaded platforms, maybe the link to a post could be included in their bio or something.