It's a lot of fun to explore places like the Melonland Forum or people's websites on Neocities, and a great replacement for scrolling the YouTube feed. I've been easing myself into it for the last few weeks, which makes boycotting YouTube easier. These small websites are more suited to a computer than a phone, but if that's accessible to you then I highly recommend looking into the web revival. If you haven't found something to replace your YouTube scrolling with yet, this can keep you busy for weeks.

Alternatively, you can also read webcomics on Comicfury, watch animations on Newgrounds, and so on.

I want to highlight some cool websites that aren't part of the mainstream internet! And well, what better place to start with than melonkinq.net?

Melon has many, many web projects, one of which is this personal website. He's a very well-known figure in the web revival movement, in part due to his Intro To The Web Revival, but that is only one of the many things he has contributed to it. I won't get into it here, since my focus is melonking.net, but there are a lot of things Melon's made that are worth looking into.

Anyway. I LOVE this website. It is so much fun to explore! There's a LOT to find, from the blog, the art gallery, random collections... but also games and secrets. Every page has chill background music too, so sometimes I just like leaving the site on in a background tab so I can listen while I do other things.

(Turns out my hacker name is LordWire)

The wild mix of textures and gifs and other assets makes this site feel so old school and whimsical, and somehow the mish-mash of everything still ends up feeling coherent. I adore this type of organized chaos.

One of my favorite pages on melonking.net is the voice mail section:

There's only five messages in total, but something about getting to listen to these people who once upon a time stumbled across this same page and decided to record a message, is so special. Maybe I'll leave a message too one day! Not yet though, I'd like to improve my accent a bit first :')

Luckily, there is an easier way to leave messages on the site, through the guestbook! Most websites like this have one, it's a staple of the small web.

The design is too facilitating

Good internet snags you when there is no "correct" place for your eye to go

If scrolling only takes you to the footer of the page, your eyes (and mind) have to search for a point of interest