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Despite the gargantuan size of the web, it is a common complaint that the medium feels as if it'd only consist of the same a dozen or so sites. Even if your personal media diet is healthier, maybe driven by a small set of websites that you follow via feeds, at some point that too might start to feel very much like a bubble.

How can one break out of that bubble? One piece to that puzzle might be a small class of websites, I don't know if someone already coined a term for them, but if not, I like to call serendipity engines (if my public writing were in my native German I'd call them Webwundertüten, but I don't know if the concept of a Wundertüte is widely known, the dictionary translation "grab bag" doesn't really capture the spirit of it, but probably that because it's a location-dependent and generation-specific childhood memory that I just happen to have).

Anyway, basically they are a one click jump to a random website. And this visiting a random place works suprisingly well to uncover real gems on the web. Maybe not so much suprising, when I consider that it has become borderline impossible to find something really worthwhile via the Bingoogle search duopoly. To some extent, by providing a variable reward, this taps into a similar brain mechanisms like the antisocial algorithmically curated media streams of $GenericSanFranTechBroCo, the key difference being that the purpose of these websites is exactly to not keep you engaged on them, but to lead you away and drive your traffic to some actual place on the web.

A few examples: indieblog.page, The Forest, Marginalia Website Finder, WebRoll and Kagi Small Web.

Still here? Come on, let's unironically surf the web again as if it were the nineties. Off you go!