Our mission
Preserve the independent web. Promote ownership. Resist centralization.
The Old Web Project is a cultural initiative dedicated to preserving the independent web, promoting digital ownership, and resisting the centralization of online life. Here is what that means in practice.
We’re not trying to go backward. We’re bringing the best principles of the early web forward into the future.
Independent Publishing
Personal websites, blogs, forums, fan pages, zines, and self-owned internet spaces. We champion the right to make something on the web that is yours — not a tenant farm on a platform that profits from your attention and can evict you at will.
Digital Ownership
Owning your domain, your files, your archives, your backups, and your creative work. When you control the canonical copy, no policy change, acquisition, or shutdown can take it from you.
Cultural Preservation
Preventing communities and niche knowledge from disappearing. Whole eras of human creativity have already been deleted. We support archiving, mirroring, and durable formats so culture outside the major platforms survives.
Human Discovery
Links, directories, RSS, blogrolls, and human curation instead of algorithmic feeds. Discovery should be something people do for each other — not a slot machine optimized for engagement.
Durable Media
DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, books, magazines, tapes, and local backups reinforce the same principle as a personal website: access should not depend entirely on corporations. Physical media is a secondary belief, but an important one — it represents ownership over rented access, the right to keep the art you love where no company can reach in and change it.
Independence on the web, and on the shelf.
A note on AI
Honest about the how
We’ll be transparent about something a lot of retro projects won’t: the sites in this network are built today, with modern tools — including AI. The Old Web Project is not anti-AI. We use it ourselves, every day.
The old web was never really about the technology. It was about the spirit — personal, independent, made by people who care, for other people, free of feeds and walled gardens. AI doesn’t threaten that spirit; in the right hands, it accelerates it. It has already helped spin up countless personal sites and passion projects that might never have existed otherwise — lowering the barrier so anyone can build a home of their own on the web.
AI’s rise is inevitable. What we do with it is a choice. We’d rather use it to reclaim our individuality and rebuild the open web than hand even more of the internet to a handful of platforms. The tools changed; the vision — a web that feels like ours — is the original one.
Built for humans — with the help and convenience of modern AI tools.
Help us do it
The mission only works if people build, submit, and preserve.