You can get jaded about anything. The Internet is addictive at first, but quickly everything becomes a trope and you start to see patterns, and it gets boring that way. The dark web however is like the original Internet and it's not some money making exercise (apart from all the Bitcoin scams and darknet drug markets). There's a strange Geocities feel to it.

Substack OP here:

The goal is definitely to find and capture those moments of magic that happened a lot more often in early Internet. I think some of that is having this newsletter as my framing for exploring the fringes of the Internet today, and the rest is trying to find the magic in the tools we use everyday.

Anything interesting in particular you'd recommend diving into?

> Anything interesting in particular you'd recommend diving into?

Hackernews itself is a nice portal into the indie-web, or the small pocket of indie bloggers and webmasters who share their wild and 'magic' ideas. Yes, HN is mostly geared towards programming and STEM subject matter, but now and then you see sites that are not about that.

You can also get lost in here: https://pinboard.in/recent my favorite rabbithole. If you don't mind the deluge of Twitter bookmarks and borderline-spam on that page, you may just find something 'magic' as you call it.

Substack OP here: thanks for sharing!

Would love any ideas of feedback y'all have on this first post. I'm super excited to explore this idea space.