Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool (just 2 files) to explore the small web
31 points by susam
31 points by susam
Hello Lobsters,
This tool is inspired by Kagi Small Web. Kagi Small Web currently accepts only blogs, comics and YouTube channels. It does not accept arbitrary small websites. That limitation motivated me to build Wander.
Wander is fully decentralised. Anyone with a website can host it by uploading just two files to their web server: an index.html for the console and a wander.js where you link to other websites and consoles.
It is a bit like a webring, but more flexible. Each Wander instance can link to any number of sites and other instances. There is no server-side component involved beyond a basic web server. In fact, you can host it on GitHub Pages or Codeberg Pages too.
More details here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#readme
I put this together in a couple of hours early this morning, so it may not be very polished and the list of websites is quite small. If you encounter a bug, please let me know. If you like the idea, I would be glad if you join the network.
Nice! I have Kagi Small Web bookmarked in my browser so this is really cool. Thanks for making it
I built a similar thing a few years ago: https://indieblog.page/ - it has grown to over 5000 listed sites (all manually checked by me).
It gives you a button you can drag to your bookmarks bar to easily open a random blog post. It has several RSS feeds that will give you a random link. Or you can follow it's bot on Mastodon to get a link twice a day.
Yes! Your project is very popular and it is one of my favourite places on the Web! In fact, I have got the following function in my ~/.zshrc:
pages() { for _ in {1..5}; do curl -sSw '%header{location}\n' https://indieblog.page/random | sed -E 's/[?&]utm_[^&]*//g'; done }
It works like this:
$ pages
https://creativwork.org/2026/03/14/review-of-the-movie-nomadland/
https://mfashby.net/posts/2025-12-21-service-model/
https://boehs.org/node/us-east-1
https://g4slv.info/music-a-return-to-an-old-hobby
https://lee-perry.co.uk/microfeed/2025-09-22-build-a-survey-form
Thank you for creating indieblog.page!
That's a pretty neat idea. I just deployed it on my website. Thank you for building this!
I have added your console as a neighbour to mine: https://susam.net/wander/wander.js
You are the third person I know who has set this up. I really appreciate you taking the time to try it out. Thank you!
Neat idea. IMO it would work fine as a browser extension too. Let the browser be the console.
Thank you for taking a look at this project. This is an interesting idea. I am wondering how it would work in practice. If I install such an extension in my browser, where would it fetch its initial list of URLs from?
One of my design goals with Wander has been to keep it fully decentralised, similar to the Web itself. I have tried to avoid having any centralised list of URLs or seed nodes.
Each Wander console is just a small, self-hosted node made up of two static files. Anyone can run it on their own website, define the pages they recommend and link to other consoles as neighbours. All Wander consoles are equal citizens of the network, from a technical perspective. None of them act as a canonical source of seed URLs. The network is defined entirely by these independently hosted consoles. A visitor can start from any one of them and browse the network. The console tool simply follows the console neighbourhood from one console to another and loads the recommended pages it discovers.
I wonder how this would translate to an extension-based solution. It seems like we would still need participants to host their recommendation lists somewhere on the Web, and the extension would need at least one starting point (or a list of starting points, which would effectively become a centralised seed list). Curious to know if there is some clever way to make the extension idea work without introducing a 'special' seed list of URLs.