What Makes a Web Alive
For a while the web felt like a living place — not polished, but alive. It was full of pages made by individuals who followed curiosity rather than rules. Strange corners, half-finished experiments, loose threads to pull.
That changed as the platforms grew. Our browsing turned into scrolling. Pages disappeared or were folded into feeds. Exploration narrowed.
leare.info exists to push back against that flattening. It’s meant as a space to learn and share, to surface small and strange things, and to build tools for thinking — so exploration feels alive again.
A Simple Model for a Living Web
Here’s a first cut at what makes the web feel alive:
- Messiness & personal expression: Imperfect.
- Hyperlinks as connective tissue: Ideas tied together, not locked in silos.
- Small experiments & play: Little tools, odd pages, things that surprise.
- Archival mindset: Keeping what we find alive.
- Quiet clarity over performance: Not feeds and followers, just good thinking, shared.
This is a starting point — one “variant” of a Living Web model. Other posts may explore alternative frames or extend it.
Explore What’s Left
To see early, alive web examples:
- Web Design Museum — screenshots and context from 1991–2006.
- Wiby — a search engine surfacing small, independent sites Google hides.
- GifCities — millions of rescued GeoCities GIFs, playful and weird.
Why It Matters Here
By writing down models like this and linking to living examples, leare.info is quietly building a dataset: concepts, nodes, references. Over time, those could feed maps, timelines, or experiments that help people think better and wander further.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
— Marshall McLuhan