Meet Wander, a StumbleUpon-inspired tool for discovering the ‘small web’

As search becomes increasingly dominated by AI summaries and commercial content, people are experimenting and coming up with ways to make the web feel more human like it used to, building everything from “small web” search engines to decentralized social networks . One of the newer efforts in that direction is Wander Console , an open-source, self-hosted web console that gives website visitors a way to explore other interesting sites and webpages recommended by a community of indie website owners. Susam Pal, the London-based developer of the project, says he was inspired to build the small, decentralized tool after he saw Kagi’s “small web” search tool that limits searches to certain types of content, like blogs, webcomics and YouTube channels. But that still wouldn’t surface the kind of small websites that are maintained by indie developers like Pal himself, nor web projects, mini apps, or games. That led Pal to create Wander, which puts website recommendations back into the hands of users. “Not everybody is aware of this beautiful portion of the internet, which is quirky, where we have all kinds of strange websites, where people are expressing their personality, and so on,” he said. Wander has its roots in older ideas, like the webrings that once connected independent websites and blogs, or website discovery tools like StumbleUpon , which offered serendipitous recommendations as you clicked its “Stumble!” button to discover new websites. …