What are your favourite lesser known websites?

Hucklebee@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 281 points –

I want to see if I can get a spark of the "old internet" back by making a starting page for myself with all kinds of cool websites. But not sure where to start because Google obviously will not work for this.

So... what are some of your favourite websites?

99

Got a few:

https://everynoise.com/ You can find A LOT of music genres here. Genres next to eachother resemble one another. Figure out what you like, and what genres are close to it. Clicking on the >> will take you to artists in this genre, or search for artists in the upper right corner and see what genre they fall under.

https://clickclickclick.click This one is about privacy, see what a browser can track. If you don't know much about pixeltracking, this one is a fun way to learn (and a little creepy hehe)

https://suno.com/create Create your own songs with an AI, just throw in lyrics, a genre, and you are done. A fun way to troll a friend by throwing in an old conversation

https://darknetdiaries.com/ Haven't looked into this one myself, but these are true stories on the darknet, recommended by a friend of mine.

Darknet Diaries is a podcast, rather than just a website. It’s not all about the darknet, he does tons of stories about internet security and penetration testing.

I have listened to every single episode. It’s EXCELLENT.

Came here to post EveryNoise. Absolutely incredible site that just fucking WORKS. Can't believe I went as long as I did without knowing about it.

It's interesting. Some seriously fragmented genre names. Not sure I agree with many of them, but I always like new music discovery tools.

Clickclickclick is such a great eye opener. And I'll definately will spend some time searching artists I like on Everynoise. Other two also added to my bookmarks for later viewing. Great links!

Thanks for the links, they're interesting.

https://puginarug.com/

https://zombo.com/

https://www.yyyyyyy.info/

I like single purpose concept websites that don't do anything. They're the opposite of the modern internet that values engagement above all. They communicate exactly one thing once and though you never have to go back, you're always glad that they're there.

Zombo is great. In the 10 minutes I spent there I hung the laundry, bought weekly groceries, painted my living room, got married twice, got elected minister of foreign affairs of Belgium, made first contact with 4 different alien spaces and then evolved into a whole new life form that exists in 4d space. Good site.

I agree, I love when a site is focused.

Like I said in another comment, got some big YourTheManNowDog vibes from these. Used to browse their random site visitor a lot back in the day.

Also, love how yyyyyyy seems to be a randomized site.

I'm amazed zombo still exists

When Flash died the site was down for several days. It was nerve wracking not knowing if it would return!

I don't know if it's "lesser known" but I discovered boardgamearena.com last year and I've been addicted ever since.

It's free, but there is a premium membership that gives some extra perks.

Hundreds of boardgames that you can play with others online, from rummy and checkers to Wingspan and Catan.

They offer casual matchmaking and ranked competitive modes and tournaments.

Set up an account and invite me to your favorite game! I would love to learn it! You can figure out my username on there.

BGA is fantastic. Free game selection is always growing. Membership, if you want to pay for the premium games, is a fantastic deal. Only one person in your playgroup needs a membership for everyone to play. The interface for most games is WAY better than actually playing in person and games are so much faster too. It's not as good as hanging out in person with friends, but it's damn close.

I miss the old Yahoo games site where during night shift you could play Canasta with probably some retired folks from the other side of the world

I just checked. BGA doesn't have canasta. Sorry.

How do you feel about Hearts, cribbage or Kings in the corner?

Archive.org has many facets:
Wayback Machine
Internet Arcade
Feature Films
NASA Images
Multiple Image collections
Live Music Archive
Free Audiobook Collection
Open Library
American Libraries

How stuff works is amazing.

Wikipedia should not need to be mentioned.

All great and valuable links. Thanks! Archive has so many usecases. I recently used it to get some design inspiration for old 50's and 60's catalogs and magazines. Plenty of retro and vintage stuff to find! GifCities from the Archive.org team is also great :)

It's a pretty simple concept with a lot of references, but Floor796 is fun to browse around when I'm bored. There's a few interactive bits too, if you can find them.

What do you call these? Feel like I've seen this animated and printed a bunch of times in my life.

It is far from lesser known, but my favorite standalone site is still Atlas Obscura.

So that's how 27/100 performance feels like...

Are these effective load times? I'm not exactly sure what this is.

Edit to add: Am I misreading this, or is your connection throttled? I have 0 issues loading the site with Firefox + uBlock Origin, either desktop or mobile.

I also had 0 issues. Worked fine with Firefox mobile/ublock, and with the built in Voyager browser. Didn't seem particularly slow at all.

futilitycloset.com/

Futility Closet is a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible.

If you want an excuse to visit random coordinates around you geohashing.site is a interesting option. Each day everyone is given the same set of spots to go to, with optional challenges and badges one can do. Its quite surprising how strong the community has been going despite it's age.

Here's one of my long time favorites:

http://textfiles.com/

What a treasure trove! At first glance I love all the ASCII art. But some of the texts feel like you're browsing some old Reddit/4chan posts. Will take me a while to get through all the gems!

I am really happy that you appreciate it. There is so much to explore there, be careful because it's easy to lose a lot of time browsing the files. Lol

I love reading about all the old school hacking and shit. There's some genuine 'anarchist cookbook' type of stuff in there. Probably don't try any of that shit, but it's fun to read about none the less.

Probably don’t try any of that shit,

Now you tell me, I just spent the last couple hours trying to get free CompuServe access.

I miss old StumbleUpon! It was great for this. Someone recently introduced me to Flashpoint Archive and I have a hunch that there's a bunch of good stuff there.

Ooh yeah, the Flashpoint Archive is an amazing resource! I've dabbled in it before. Great blast from the past!

https://wikimapia.org/

It's a map site that helps you identify places around the world. Google maps is so commerce-focussed, Open Street Map often lacks an explanation of what something is.

But it clearly has issues such as not licensing the background options so it has watermarks and popups.

Opentripmap.com is similar, but is probably just OSM data.

Wikimapia is great for "what's that wierd marking in the desert"-type questions.

This question reminded me of 27b/6, a website with a collections of essays and email exchanges from the author that are like humourous, satirical and based on his life. I had a lot of fun reading them years ago and I remember that it was dormant for a while but coming back it seems to have new material.

Oh god, I totally forgot about that one. I loved it. The content still seems to be great, too. Nice.

I couldn't think of many less visited sites I usually go to often, but coalregion(dot)com is an interesting site I found using this Wiby search engine a long time ago. It's a site about a region in Pennsylvania. They have a section for recipes supposedly from that region along with a section for words/slang from that regions past. They got other things, but the dictionary and recipes interest me more than the other parts.

yucata.de is an online-play boardgame website.

Fully DIY and community built site. Free accounts and free play, although donations are accepted.

Fun small games to start with:

Port Royal, Mountain Goats, Spexxx, Ali Baba, Balloon Cup, Dragonheart, Rose King, Pompeii.

And some quality bigger games:

Bruges, Innovation, Targi, Chakra, Stone Age, Grand Austria Hotel, Imhotep, Finca, Carcassonne South Seas, Thurn & Taxis.

sci-news.com is pretty great for science news from a wide variety of fields.

Metafilter is a wonderful weblog, and I also read Canlii, which is a legal case website which is a wonderful rabbit hole to fall down to learn about how legal decisions are made.

Since people are posting games, I'll throw in Realms of Despair

do you know how the leveling gain works? do dwarves with thei less than one level slower than elves with more than one. im thinking its the opposite maybe as ones that are more than one seem to have more special things.

I never really paid attention to the level gain ratio. I'd look here for that kind of question.

hey sorry for all the bother and putting you on the spot but I find the thing sorta spams me with my location information. I asked in newbie chat on that and the other thing and there were some configs that mitigated it but some folks said its based on your client. I did not want to spam the chat with what clients people where using so I was wondering if you used anything special. im using putty.

No bother!

For customization, you want a MUD client rather than a standard telnet client. I used zMUD back in the day, but FLOSS was harder to come by back then. These days, I'd go with mudlet.

yeah the wikis don't seem to have the info. I think they figure its self evident from the math equation but im not sure if its used on exp gain which it sounds like or exp needed to gain. it makes me wonder because if its on gain it would suggest races with seemingly more special benefits would leve faster. which makes no sense.

I'm not sure if they're still around, but PostSecret and the Internet K-Hole were sites you could spend hours on.

Whoah, Internet K-Hole is so cool! I love random older photographs. Good stuff! PostSecret seems interesting too!

Used to be thefuckinghomepage but they recently stopped updating

Someone else already mentioned wiby.me, so here's something else:

https://www.arngren.net/

I have no fucking clue what this site is. I feel like it's a catalog for some Eldritch business, and that I could order literally anything I wanted from it if I could just figure out how to use it.

I don't know what I'm looking at and I'm loving it.

It's like if the Craigslist guy was like "You know what, I think I'm going to open my own outdoor store". I like the little link to the page about his car. No bragging, no showing off... just a "Hey, this is my car. These are it's specifications. Check it out."

Could probably buy something from the site, and request the owner sell it to you only after going out for a beer together, and it'd probably work.

Found two sound/music generating websites (before AI music was cool):

Adventuremachine

Patapap. This one also has some other interesting sites in it's footer (on desktop)