How to Build the Good Internet

Stepping out of the dark forest and reclaiming a social, handmade and cozy web

The following piece is a collaboration between Matt Klein + Sacha Judd.

Sacha Judd is a writer based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She’s spent the last decade speaking about the intersection of the tech sector and fan communities at conferences like Velocity, Webstock, and Beyond Tellerrand. She has written on these topics for Letterboxd’s Journal, The Spinoff, Pantograph Punch, and has been quoted in Teen Vogue and Rolling Stone. You can subscribe to her newsletter here.

“The internet is broken.”

It sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not an entirely unfair proclamation.

Meant to act as a decentralized network to service the military for research and science personnel in the ‘60s, today, the internet has never felt more centralized.

A handful of platforms control the lion's share of traffic, as well as the ad dollars and venture capital, which funded their cycle.

Despite intentions to connect and make the world feel smaller, social fragmentation is the norm as we buckle under the anxiety of performing for the world. Such anxiety compounds as we’re now instantaneously plugged into every- and any conflict, crisis, gossip or drama put online. Attention and engagement at all costs.

And so algorithms reward outrage and sensationalism, conditioning undesirable behaviors and outlooks, while antisocial behaviors have become too common across our everyday interactions. Personal privacy has been co-opted by surveillance capitalism. Link rot and poor maintenance makes navigation and information retrieval increasingly difficult.

We continue to feverishly collect followers and connections, despite the science supporting we can only maintain roughly 150 relationships at a time. The phenomenon of Audience Capture puppeteers our online contributions, sacrificing creative integrity and sanity just to appease strangers.

Shadow-banning and censorship are at war with freedom of expression. And AI slop and bots make it unclear if we’re actually witnessing or interacting with other real humans. The Dead Internet Theory posits that since roughly 2016, the majority of the internet has been run by bots.

And these are just the common claims.

Amidst such decay it’s therefore obvious why we’ve seen the rise of “The Cozy Web.”

Without a single definition, generally speaking...

The Cozy Web represents the growing interest in more private, intimate, and gate-kept spaces, offering respite from the noisy, polluted, global “town square.”

The Cozy Web (AKA the indie-, DIY-, hand-made-, self-hosted-, personal-, digital-garden web) embodies independently-owned sites (vs. billion-dollar platforms), and celebrates smaller networks centered around ideas and interests – not just around people (or audiences) for the sake of it.

The Cozy Web is civil and free from exploitative business models, attention-mining and algorithms. And The Cozy Web places power in the hands of people.

In short, these tiny pockets of the web feel gentle and, well, cozy.

Cozy as a concept is having a moment. We talk about enjoying “cozy mysteries” – books and shows in which amateur detectives solve charming local crimes – an antidote to brutalized women and serial killers. And during the pandemic, we took up “cozy gaming,” discussing the price of turnips on our Animal Crossing islands during work Zoom calls.

Cozy implies respite; but it also implies retreat — a running from...

In 2019, Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter and Metalabel, penned a piece titled “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.”

In it he refers to the The Three Body Problem by sci-fi author Liu Cixin, who presents the theory that when we peer into space, it seems like we’re the only ones. After all, wouldn’t we see or hear about other life?

But perhaps this silence and darkness isn’t due to a lack of presence, but because being visible is a vulnerability to predators.

In “the dark forest,” to survive, animals must remain hidden and quiet. Can the same evolutionary instincts apply to our online spaces?

Likely.

Strickler suggests,

“This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest. In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.”

He continues,

“The dark forests grow because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there.”

And since 2019, private Discord, Slack and WhatsApp channels are now more popular than ever, providing coverage, safety and intimacy. Permanent group chats become a primary mode of communication. Meanwhile, communities like those on Reddit and Tumblr connect people to their passions and permit more control over one’s identity. Finstas and audience filtering provide more unfiltered expression. And podcasts and newsletters offer more direct communication in more secluded channels. If you know, you know.

With increased “safety” across these means of communication, one feels more at home... and cozier. According to surveys by research studio Early Studies which asked where people are – and will – find real support networks, “online communities” and “group chats” are forecasted to grow in reliance between 2025 and 2029.

But the “cozy” label or posture does not guarantee proof that the space is in fact cozy.

As for the founders of Substack,

“For years, creators have lived with the norm of renting space on big social media properties so they can amass a following and convert it into income through brand deals, affiliate links, sponsorships, entertainment deals, and so on. The problem is that this arrangement gives far too much power to the landlords. If you fall afoul of a platform’s opaque rules, or it decides an advertiser’s needs take priority over yours, or – God forbid – your government bans it, then you are out of luck.”

Yet, when we analyze Substack’s business decisions, from taking revenue cuts (Substack is also a landlord despite their best attempts to dunk on them), focusing on “followers” (preventing creators from accessing audience members’ emails), pressuring members to download their app, switching delivery to in-app, and constructing a feed that mimics that of Twitter, it’s clear that even if you talk the talk, it does not mean you walk it.

Oh... and the fear of biting the hand that feeds is another anxiety in our moment online (ZINE publishes via Substack).

Regardless of Substack’s genuine attempts to embrace the cozy ethos, at large, we’re witnessing a shift away from the corporate mega-mall mentality of the internet, and to that of self-reliant mom-and-pop shops. There is a newfound desire to celebrate the handmade and humble over the mass-marketed and universal.

So what if, instead of retreating, we started seeking out and building The Good Internet again.

The Good Internet is poetic, tender and leafy — a defiant opposition to the commercial, soulless and metal.

As Molly White wrote, the rest of the web is out there, just beyond the walls.

“If we wanted, each of us could escape those walls and set up our own spaces within the limitless, fertile soil beyond. Some of us might opt to leave those walls permanently, while others might choose to split our time between our beautiful, messy, free world outside to maintain smaller, meticulously-groomed simulacrums within the enclosures that hint — without angering our landlords — at the creations beyond. We can periodically smuggle seeds and plant cuttings beyond the walls, ensuring that if the proprietors decide to evict us, our gardens will live on.”

In 2023, alongside Matt Muir and Kristoffer Tjalve, we founded the first ever Tiny Awards.

We asked: “What if there were awards for the off-the-beaten path, fun-for-fun-sake, web-projects that you otherwise wouldn’t know about?”

What if there were awards celebrating The Good Internet?

For Kristoffer Tjalve,

“The internet, or more specifically, the web, is not outside of ourselves. It is something we make, and we could make it differently.”

We believed there should be honors for those tending to the garden of the internet, amplifying their work, encouraging others to participate, and reminding all of the alternatives outside of algorithmic supremacy. We initially described the Awards as celebrating:

“The other web, the one that is small and handmade and isn't trying to sell you anything or monetize anything, but which instead is about people using the digital tools we all have access to to make the sorts of small, personal experiences that you tend not to see in feed.”

Over the last couple of years, we’ve watched hundreds of submissions pour into The Tiny Awards with hundreds of more votes cast from around the world.

2024’s winner was One Minute Park by Elliott Cost, a site allowing you to visit parks from around the world for one minute each thanks to user uploaded videos of their local parks. So far, Cost collected nearly 200 minutes of park footage. The site lives on its own. There is no business model. There is no strategy other than for visitors to explore parks.

Other recognitions were One Million Checkboxes, a collaborative challenge for the internet to check 1,000,000 boxes (mission accomplished), The Hydrant Directory, a gallery of colorful fire hydrants from around the world, and Fridge Poetry, a virtual fridge canvas to collaborate on word magnet poetry with strangers.

Interest in the Tiny Awards is a signal of interest in hand-made projects, but more importantly and larger, a newfound spirit and approach to our internet in this moment.

Making for the web is easy, but most of us have forgotten how – ceding our digital agency to platforms and corporate landlords.

It’s time that we reclaim that independence for ourselves.

It’s become easy to gripe about the enshittification of the internet, but as Muir points out, no one is forcing us to consume the junk if we don’t like it.

“If your favorite TV station, radio station or newspaper stopped being what you liked and instead started being full of stuff you didn't like, would you keep watching/listening/reading, or would you go and try and find an alternative? Why should the web be any different?”

We are in control of both what we consume and what we contribute.

As Sacha Judd wrote recently, the original metaphor of “surfing” the internet implied motion. The metaphor of “platforms” implies staying still. In the days before search engines, we relied on word of mouth: hand-crafted online directories of interesting links, physical books about what was good online. We connected bi-directionally; we used webrings and rec lists. And above all, we encouraged exploration. That’s the energy we need to get back: one of exploration. We need to rewild our attention:

“If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence. [...] Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly un-viral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.”

If we agree that community is the heart of the internet, how do we empower people to find one another – to find the vibrant neighborhood where their kindred spirits are hanging out?

You can only get somewhere when you leave the station.

Discussing the future of the internet is fundamentally a conversation about balance. Harmony. We may still require parts of what we’re trying to escape. This is why the “fleeing” part is short-sighted. After all, how would we even create or get the word out about the Tiny Awards without relying upon larger platforms for organizing or amplification? The irony.

Imagining an internet of only closed-off coziness and private channels is idealistic yet impractical. We run the risk of exclusionary gatekeeping, where value (ex. access to information, or entertainment) becomes too restricted. This defeats the original concept of the internet. Smaller spaces can become homogeneous – we lose the serendipity of chance encounters.

There is a place and value for the close-knit as much as there’s still value in the mass, but only if we take advantage of the limitless possibilities of the web and get exploring.

Some ideas...

01. Become Builders

Instead of the binary choice between being passive consumers of algorithmic doom loops, or retreating to cozy spaces, we need to reclaim the tools of building for the web. Make what you want to see. It’s never been easier (particularly with a little help from AI) to create something small, personal, funny, joyful. Something that solves a problem only you have, or just makes you smile. Make a site that helps you replan your LEGO city, or tells you where your closest panda is, or choose between chickens. Make a site that everyone on the internet can alter just by calling a phone number. Make any site you like. We reclaim the web when we start building again.

Ask yourself: Are you proud of what you’re putting out into the world? Or are you stealing someone’s time and attention?

Artisans of the Good Internet channel passion and the output is pride. We can make and play for play's sake without documenting, publishing and commercializing it. We can be proud without capitalizing on output.

02. Make Maps

The internet shouldn’t work to keep us stuck, paralyzed in feeds, but rather it should bridge us to offline experiences, social gatherings or Good Internet projects. Off-ramps from the superhighways to smaller townships or offline spaces and nature is what we should be prioritizing.

Our internet should serve us rather than us serving it.

How may we make the Cozy and the offline, the destination, not a mere pit-stop? ‘Good’ isn’t a place, but a state. ‘Good’ can be anywhere we want it to be.

Kristoffer and Elliott Cost recently released the Internet Phone Book, a deliberate throwback to the nineties, but also a new kind of map to the Good Internet. Coincidently, the idea for the book actually came from working on an internet map.

If we turn our backs on “For You” and “Recommended” – a diet of slop from algorithms – we need to prioritize old-fashioned discovery. Bring back “webrings,” link to your favorite places on the Good Internet, make custom social feeds, think in public, and share the journey.

03. Go Exploring

You are the sum of your attention. Do you like it?

Go for a long walk online, get off the beaten paths. Follow ideas back to the source. Build and tend a digital garden of the things you find and the ideas you’re interested in. Collect. Stop thinking that you need to have a polished piece ready to perform for the internet before you share it – your exploration will intersect with someone else’s and the web will start to work (bi-directionally, as intended) again.

The Good Internet isn’t a broadcast medium. It’s a thriving neighborhood full of interesting people.

The web doesn’t have to be corporate, addictive, or rage-inducing.

It can be weird, personal, and genuinely social again.

The Good Internet is human. It’s you. Us.

Contribute, document and explore.

Reclaim.