Who Needs a Publisher When You Have a Stapler?

There is something wonderfully strange about people making their own magazines. Not professional magazines with advertising departments, editors and subscription systems. I’m talking about little publications made at home, sometimes consisting of nothing more than a few folded sheets of paper, some photographs, drawings, stories or whatever else someone feels like sharing.

I’ve known about zines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zine) for quite some time, but I never realised just how large, diverse and fascinating the world of people making, collecting and exchanging them actually is. And when I say an entire world, I really do mean the world. From photography enthusiasts in Japan to poets in Uganda and creative communities in India, people of all ages are publishing their own little magazines.

Why? That’s what I wanted to find out.

It started with a photographer

My little journey began with two posts on Photoni.st, a personal photography blog written by Cedric. The first was about his Zine Exchange Club (https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/04/24/zine-exchange-club/), and the second showed one of the zines he had created (https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/10/25/zine-exchange-club-zine-1/).

Cedric’s story is rather nice. In the late 1980s, while still at school, he started writing parodies of anarchist manifestos that someone had been putting on the school noticeboards. This turned into a kind of anonymous conversation between the two writers. Eventually, his single-page jokes grew into longer publications.

A few years later, he started a zine called Beark!, containing humour, film reviews and whatever else he felt like writing about. And here’s the part I particularly enjoyed: he distributed it through BBS systems and FTP servers. Yes, BBS! Those wonderful early computer networks I’ve written about before. Today, Cedric makes photography zines. He also runs a small exchange club where people send their publications to one another.

What caught my attention was something he mentioned in his latest post. Most of his zines are unique. He makes one copy, sends it to someone, and that’s it. The recipient may be the only person ever to see it.

Imagine that. We live in a world where people are constantly trying to increase their audience, attract more followers and get their content in front of as many people as possible. And here’s someone happily producing a publication for an audience of one. I rather like that.

But why make a zine at all?

Initially, I assumed zines were mainly created by people who felt that traditional media weren’t covering their interests properly. And historically, that certainly played a role. Science fiction enthusiasts were making fanzines back in the 1930s. They wanted to discuss stories, exchange ideas and create their own communities. Later, punk fans started publishing their own magazines because established music publications often didn’t understand or represent their scene. The riot grrrl movement in the 1990s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_grrrl) also embraced zines as a way for young women to write about music, feminism and their own experiences without waiting for approval from traditional publishers.

But there are many other reasons to make a zine. Some people want to share their obsession with a particular hobby. Others want to experiment with photography, illustration or creative writing. Some have political or social messages they want to communicate. And others simply enjoy the process of creating something themselves. You don’t need a publisher, a business plan or even a particularly large audience. You just make something. And apparently, people are doing precisely that all over the world.

Japan: where a zine can become a little work of art

Japan was one of the first places that caught my attention when I started looking into contemporary zine culture. There is a fascinating world of independent publishing there, particularly around photography, illustration, typography and graphic design. The Tokyo Art Book Fair (https://tokyoartbookfair.com/) brings together artists, designers and independent publishers. Some produce beautifully designed books, while others create inexpensive, experimental zines.

Browsing through the exhibitors is rather like wandering through an enormous collection of personal creative projects. One Japanese initiative I particularly liked is Anyway Press (http://www.anywaypress.net). Its approach is based on experimenting with language, typography, poetry, colours and shapes through self-publishing. Its motto is wonderfully uncomplicated: “Anyway, let’s print something. And see where it takes us.” Another example is Zerofeedback (https://zrfdbck.com), a Tokyo-based independent publishing platform focused on photography and visual culture.

What interests me here is that zines aren’t necessarily cheap-looking photocopied magazines. They can be carefully designed little art objects. The choice of paper, printing technique, typography and binding can become part of the story. A publication might contain only a few photographs, yet someone has spent hours deciding how those images should appear together. That’s something quite different from posting a few pictures on Instagram.

India: zines as a way of bringing people together

Then I discovered Zinedabaad (https://riyabehl.in/work/zinedabaad), an initiative from India. Founded in 2020 by Riya Behl and Devashree Somani, Zinedabaad explores how zines can be used for creative expression, research and community building.

What began as a single workshop has developed into something much larger. According to co-founder Riya Behl, the collective has collaborated with more than 90 organisations and individuals, organised over 100 workshops, talks and pop-up libraries, and assembled an archive of more than 500 zines from the Global South, particularly South Asia. An archive of more than 500 zines! Just imagine the diversity of stories, ideas, drawings and personal experiences collected there.

And the workshops are particularly interesting. Zines aren’t merely publications that people make at home and distribute afterwards. Making them together can be a social activity in its own right. People who might never consider themselves writers or artists discover that they can create a publication about something important to them. There is no need to convince an editor that your subject is interesting enough. You decide that yourself.

Uganda: poetry, identity and personal stories

I wasn’t expecting my little exploration of zines to take me to Uganda, but that’s exactly what happened. In Kampala, poet and writer Gloria Kiconco (https://www.gloriakiconco.com/about) has been creating and publishing poetry zines for years. Her publications include SOLD OUT (2016), RETURN TO SENDER (2018), created with illustrator Liz Kobusinge, and Tunnel of Delight (2021).

Her work explores subjects such as identity, belonging and mental health. I found her profile at the Prince Claus Fund (https://princeclausfund.nl/awardees/gloria-kiconco) particularly interesting. It describes how she combines self-publishing with readings, spoken-word performances and collaborations with other artists. She has also worked with communities whose voices are often underrepresented in conventional cultural spaces.

Here, zines serve a somewhat different purpose from the photography publications in Japan. They provide a way to tell personal stories, experiment with language and create space for experiences that might not otherwise find a publisher. And the format is accessible. You don’t need an established literary career to produce a small collection of poems. A printer and a few sheets of paper can be enough.

Mexico: publishing without asking permission

Mexico offers yet another variation. Among the exhibitors at the 2025 Tokyo Art Book Fair was arigatos press (https://www.arigatospress.com/arigatos-press), an independent Mexican publishing and art collective. Its members combine photography, illustration, graphic design and literature in zines, prints and other small publications.

The collective describes its work as a way to share artistic practices and political views, while encouraging underrepresented voices to tell their own stories. I find that particularly interesting because it illustrates how zines can exist somewhere between artistic experimentation, personal publishing and activism. Not every zine needs to make a statement, of course. Some are simply funny, beautiful or delightfully weird. But the possibility is always there.

Young people, older people, and everyone in between

Something else surprised me while exploring this world. Zines aren’t exclusively associated with young people. Of course, teenagers and students make them. They’re wonderfully suitable for school projects, creative workshops and experimenting with ideas. But adults of all ages make them too. Some are artists or photographers who have been publishing independently for decades. Others discover the format much later in life.

I even found examples of zine-making workshops organised for senior citizens. Which makes sense when you think about it. There is no age limit on wanting to share a story, make something with your hands or exchange ideas with other people. And unlike so many digital activities, there isn’t really a technical barrier to entry either. Paper, scissors, glue, a pen and perhaps access to a photocopier. That’s about it.

Readers, not followers

Another website I discovered during this little investigation is Zine Exchange (https://zine.exchange/). It’s a platform designed to help people make, discover and exchange physical zines. Its manifesto (https://zine.exchange/manifesto/) contains an idea that I think gets to the heart of this entire phenomenon: readers matter more than followers. The people behind Zine Exchange aren’t interested in creating yet another social network where success is measured by follower counts, likes and impressions. They want people to make something, put it in an envelope and send it to another human being.

And that makes me wonder whether something rather interesting is happening here. For years, the internet has made publishing increasingly easy. Anyone can start a blog, upload photographs, launch a newsletter or publish videos. That’s wonderful, of course. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy the IndieWeb so much. But perhaps the sheer scale of online publishing is also encouraging some people to move in the opposite direction. Instead of trying to reach thousands of people, they create something for ten. Or five. Or just one. Instead of publishing another post that disappears into an endless stream of updates, they create something that someone can actually hold. And instead of depending on an algorithm to find an audience, they simply send their work to someone who wants to read it.

An internet full of little worlds

There is another fascinating aspect to all this. Although zines are often physical publications, the internet plays an important role in helping their makers find one another. Someone in Belgium or France can discover a history zine from Hongkong, an art project in South Africa or a creative collective in Singapore. They can contact the maker, exchange publications or simply explore an entirely unfamiliar world.

A nice starting point is ZineMap (https://zinemap.vercel.app/), a collaborative map where people document zine libraries, events, makers and other parts of the international zine scene. It’s precisely the kind of website that can keep me happily browsing for far longer than I originally intended.

And perhaps that’s what I enjoy most about these discoveries. There’s no single zine culture. There are countless little communities, each doing things in its own way. Some are political. Some are artistic. Some are about photography, music, hobbies or personal experiences. Others are so wonderfully specific that only a handful of people may understand why someone wanted to make them.

But that’s fine. Actually, that’s rather the point. You don’t need to find an existing audience before you start creating something. Sometimes you make something simply because you think it should exist. nThat’s actually how Just Me started, too. I simply wanted a place to write about the things I come across that fascinate me, whatever the subject. Whether anyone actually reads those posts is much less important to me. I just enjoy writing them. Then again, perhaps someone, somewhere, will be delighted to stumble upon something I’ve published here.

I started exploring zines because of a photographer making little booklets and sending them to strangers. A few clicks later, I was reading about independent publishers in Tokyo, creative workshops in India, poetry in Uganda and artists in Mexico. Another reminder of just how much is happening away from the big platforms and familiar websites. And I keep returning to one thought. What if the future of independent publishing isn’t about reaching more people, but about making something that really matters to just a few?

AI Agents, the Big Undo and the Future of Publishing

The personal web is making a comeback, AI agents are changing how we consume information, and publishers are looking for new ways to get paid. At first, these seem like separate developments. I’m beginning to think they are all part of the same story.

I have been spending quite a lot of time lately exploring what people sometimes call the small web, the personal web or the IndieWeb. These are rather loose terms for an internet where people publish on their own websites, discover one another through independent services and don’t necessarily depend on a handful of enormous platforms.

It started with a few articles that caught my attention. One was Ben Thompson’s The End of the Internet (https://stratechery.com/2026/the-end-of-the-internet/). Another was Dave Winer’s Big Undo (https://bigundo.org/). And then there was Marco Arment’s wonderfully personal essay Community (https://marco.org/2026/10/24/community).

They approached the subject from different directions, but I found myself returning to the same question: what if the internet we have become accustomed to is not the final version of the internet? What if the enormous platforms that dominate so much of our online lives are simply one phase in its development? And what if the next phase consists of thousands, perhaps millions, of much smaller applications and services that communicate through open standards?

But while looking into these projects, I realized that something else is happening at exactly the same time. The way information is consumed is changing. And this second development could have enormous consequences for anyone who creates, owns or publishes content.

I’ve written about several of these developments on Just Me before. Some posts explored the return of the personal web and the ideas behind the Big Undo. Others looked at AI agents, the changing relationship between publishers and technology companies, and emerging ways to license content and get paid for its use.

Each time, I was fascinated by a particular development, project or idea. But the more I explored these subjects, the more I began to realize that they weren’t separate stories at all. They were pieces of a much larger puzzle. And while I had been writing about those pieces individually, I hadn’t really tried to put them all together and see what the complete picture might look like.

So that’s what I wanted to do here: revisit the different ideas I’ve been exploring, explain how they relate to one another, and try to understand what they might mean for the future of the internet, particularly for people and organizations that create and publish information.

Which explains why this has turned into a rather long post. A very, very long post, actually. But I hope you’ll bear with me. I think the connections between all these developments are at least as fascinating as the individual pieces themselves.

First, what exactly is the Big Undo?

Dave Winer is one of the pioneers of blogging, RSS and several other technologies that helped shape the early web. His Big Undo proposal is surprisingly straightforward. Instead of building another gigantic platform that tries to do everything, why not create lots of small applications that work together? A writing application should help you write. A publishing system should publish your work. A discovery service should help people find interesting things. A discussion service should enable conversations. And the connections between those applications should be based on open standards.

Winer has specifically mentioned Markdown and RSS 2.0 as useful foundations. In a follow-up post on October 27 (http://scripting.com/2026/10/27.html), he connected his ideas to Thompson’s observations and Arment’s reflections on online communities.

I particularly like the simplicity of this approach. You don’t need to convince millions of people to move to a new platform. You don’t need to invent an entirely new internet protocol. You can build something useful by connecting existing components.

That sounds almost too obvious. But it is remarkably different from the model that has dominated the technology industry for the past twenty years. Today, a successful internet company is generally expected to attract as many users as possible, keep them within its own environment and continuously expand the services it provides.

Big Undo suggests the opposite. Build something small. Make it useful. Let it communicate with other applications. And make sure people can leave without losing everything they have created.

An internet made of small pieces

The interesting thing is that this isn’t just a theoretical discussion. People are already building parts of this alternative internet. Take Bubbles (https://bubbles.town/), a discovery service developed in Germany. It helps readers find interesting articles published on independent blogs.

The important detail is that Bubbles doesn’t require those bloggers to move their writing to a new platform. They continue publishing on their own websites. Bubbles discovers their articles through RSS and helps other people find them. When you click an article, you visit the original website.

I find that a beautiful idea. Instead of becoming another destination that absorbs everybody’s content, Bubbles acts as a connection between independent publishers and potential readers.

Similar approaches can be found elsewhere. In China, independent blog directories such as Bloghao (https://bloghao.xiaowuleyi.com/) help readers discover personal websites. South Korea has Indieblog (https://indieblog.net/), which brings together independently published blogs. Japan has a wonderful tradition of webrings and small website alliances, including the dōmei communities described at https://do.gt-gt.org/what-is-union/.

In France, the CHATONS network (https://www.chatons.org/) demonstrates that even digital services and hosting infrastructure can be organized through cooperating independent providers rather than a single enormous company.

And around the AT Protocol (https://atproto.com/), developers are experimenting with applications that share identities and data while serving different communities. One particularly interesting development is Standard.site (https://standard.site/), an initiative to make long-form publishing interoperable across applications.

These projects differ enormously in their ambitions and technologies. They are not one coordinated movement, and there is no evidence that they are about to replace the major platforms. But they share an interesting principle. The application is no longer necessarily the place where your information has to live forever. It can simply be one of several tools you use to work with information you control.

AI may be making this possible

Ben Thompson adds another intriguing element to the story. AI is making it easier for individuals and small groups to develop software. A few years ago, building a specialized application required considerable programming expertise, time or money. Today, AI coding assistants can help people create software that might never have been commercially viable. This doesn’t eliminate the need for testing, maintenance or security. AI-generated software can certainly introduce new problems. But it changes the economics of building small tools.

I recognize this from my own experiments. I have been developing applications that help me organize information, explore my bookmarks and work with my own files. These are not products I intend to sell to millions of people. They solve problems that interest me. And I am certainly not the only person experimenting this way.

The result could be a rather different software landscape: instead of adapting everything we do to a relatively small collection of applications, more people may start creating applications around their own needs. If these applications use open standards, they can also become part of a much larger ecosystem. That is one possible future for the personal internet.

I realized I had already built a small piece of this internet

There was something rather amusing about all this. While exploring Bubbles and the ideas behind Big Undo, I suddenly realized that I had already built something that works along surprisingly similar lines. Actually, I had built two of them.

One is Digital Twin News (https://digitaltwinnews.tech/), a website that collects news and articles about digital twins from sources around the world. The other is Around The IT World (https://www.aroundtheitworld.news/), which does something similar for IT news. Both websites run entirely automatically. They use RSS feeds to discover articles on other websites, collect information about those articles and present them in specialized news feeds.

And there is one principle I considered essential from the beginning: the original articles stay exactly where they are, on the websites of their original publishers. I am not trying to create another publishing platform where other people’s articles are copied and republished. The purpose is to help readers discover interesting material and then visit the original source.

In that respect, the underlying idea is quite similar to Bubbles, although my websites don’t have its voting and community features. There is, however, another important difference. My systems search for news in roughly 25 language areas, not just English. That means they discover articles published in languages that many English-speaking readers would never normally encounter.

To make those articles accessible, I use locally running AI models to generate short English descriptions of the original publications. These descriptions are intended to give visitors enough information to decide whether an article interests them. The AI-generated text is not supposed to replace the original article. It is a discovery aid, a way of saying: Here’s something interesting happening somewhere in the world. Would you like to know more? And because the AI runs locally, I don’t need to send the articles to an external AI service simply to generate those descriptions.

What I find particularly interesting is the multilingual aspect. The internet contains an enormous amount of valuable information that remains largely invisible to people who don’t speak the language in which it was published. An interesting development in Japanese manufacturing, a new technology project in Brazil or an IT security initiative reported by a publication in Eastern Europe might never appear in the English-language news sources that many of us follow.

But that doesn’t make those stories any less interesting. By combining RSS, local AI and independent publishing, I can create a discovery service that crosses those language barriers while keeping the original publishers at the center of the process.

Of course, these websites are not identical to Bubbles. They are topic-focused news discovery services rather than communities, and the automated summaries introduce questions about attribution, copyright and the boundaries of permitted reuse. Those questions deserve attention, especially as standards for AI-related licensing develop.

Still, the realization made me smile. I had been reading about a movement advocating smaller, independent internet applications that connect existing websites instead of replacing them. And without consciously setting out to follow that philosophy, I had already built two examples of something remarkably similar.

Perhaps that is what makes Big Undo so interesting. You don’t necessarily need to join a movement or adopt a grand technological vision. Sometimes, you simply set out to solve a practical problem using open standards and a handful of small, and maybe self-built tools, only to discover that you’ve arrived at much the same place.

But there is also a more complicated side to this story. My websites use AI to help people discover original publications. Other AI systems increasingly use those same publications to answer questions without necessarily sending readers to the source. And that brings us to the second major development reshaping the internet.

What happens when the reader is an AI agent?

For most of the web’s history, publishers have built their business models around human visitors. Someone searches for information, discovers an article, clicks a link and arrives at a website. The publisher might earn money from advertising, subscriptions, memberships, sponsorships or other services. Even when the article itself is free, the visit has value. Search engines and social networks became enormously influential because they controlled a large part of that journey.

Now imagine a different situation. A data center manager wants to know which liquid-cooling technologies are suitable for a new AI facility. Instead of searching Google and visiting five specialist websites, he or she asks an AI assistant to investigate the subject. The assistant searches the web, retrieves information from technical publications, compares specifications and produces a useful report. The manager gets his answer. But he may never visit the websites that provided the information.

Those publishers have contributed valuable knowledge, yet they might receive no visitor, no advertising revenue and no opportunity to sell a subscription. And if the AI assistant performs the research automatically, the publisher may not even know how its information was used.

This is not merely a new form of search. It changes the relationship between the creator of information and the person or system consuming it. The customer may no longer be the person reading the article. It may be the software agent gathering information on that person’s behalf.

That is where the discussion becomes particularly interesting.

The old deal between publishers and search engines is breaking down

For many years, the relationship between search engines and publishers was based on a relatively simple exchange. Publishers allowed search engines to index their content. In return, search engines helped people discover the original websites. It was never a perfectly balanced relationship, but the principle was understandable.

AI-powered services can work differently. They may use retrieved information to construct answers that satisfy the user without requiring a visit to the original source. There is also an important distinction between different kinds of AI use. Training an AI model on a large collection of documents is not the same as retrieving a current article to answer a specific question. Summarizing a webpage is not the same as reproducing it. And an AI agent purchasing access to a specialized database is different again. These activities have different technical, economic and legal implications. Yet they are often discussed as if they were all the same thing.

Publishers are now trying to establish clearer rules. And an entire collection of initiatives is emerging to help them. What interests me now is how closely these initiatives connect to Big Undo.

RSL: telling AI systems what they may do with your content

One of the most important developments is Really Simple Licensing, or RSL (https://rslstandard.org/). RSL is an open standard designed to let publishers express licensing and usage conditions in a format that software can understand.

Think of it as an additional layer of information attached to published content. A website can indicate that certain uses are free, that attribution is required, or that particular forms of AI processing require a license or payment. RSL 1.0 also includes mechanisms for license discovery, authorization and reporting. It can work alongside familiar web technologies, including RSS and robots.txt.

The connection to RSS is particularly interesting. RSS was designed to make content easier to distribute between independent applications. RSL is attempting to make the conditions for using that content machine-readable as well.

In other words, we are beginning to see a distinction between two questions.

How can software find and retrieve information?

And:

What is that software allowed to do with the information once it has found it?

These are different questions, and they require different answers.

An especially interesting development is that RSL 1.0 can also reference reporting profiles such as SPUR Content Telemetry (https://contenttelemetry.org/). This creates a more concrete connection between machine-readable licensing conditions and the reporting of how AI systems actually use content.

Instead of treating permissions and usage reporting as entirely separate problems, publishers can begin to describe them as parts of the same licensing arrangement. For example, a license could establish the conditions under which content may be retrieved and specify how subsequent usage should be reported.

This doesn’t guarantee compliance or independent verification, but it is an important step toward an interoperable system. RSL doesn’t magically compel every AI company to respect a publisher’s wishes, either. Publishing licensing conditions is not the same as enforcing them. But it provides a common language for communicating those conditions. And common languages are exactly what an internet of independent components needs.

The RSL 1.0 specification is available at https://rslstandard.org/rsl.

x402: what if an AI agent could simply pay?

Now imagine that an AI agent discovers a useful specialist article. The publisher allows access, but only under a paid license. How does the AI agent actually pay? Today, payments often involve creating an account, signing a contract, entering credit card details or subscribing to a service. These are familiar processes for humans, but rather awkward for software agents operating automatically.

That is where x402 (https://www.x402.org/) becomes relevant. The idea is to make payment part of a normal web interaction. A service can indicate that payment is required. A compatible client can then provide the necessary payment authorization and continue its request.

The name “x402” refers to HTTP status code 402, traditionally associated with payment requirements. The interesting possibility is that an AI agent could pay for access to a specific piece of information without requiring a human to manually complete every transaction. Perhaps a specialist publisher charges for a particular technical dataset. Perhaps an AI research service pays to retrieve a verified market report. Or perhaps an agent purchases access to a continuously updated database.

Of course, there are plenty of unresolved questions. How much should an article cost? Who is responsible when an agent makes an unauthorized purchase? How are refunds handled? And what happens when hundreds of small transactions become more expensive to administer than the information itself?

But the principle is significant. If software agents are becoming consumers of digital information, they may need ways to become paying customers as well. Cloudflare has been exploring related ideas with Pay Per Crawl (https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/), which allows participating website owners to experiment with charging automated crawlers for access.

These technologies are not identical. Nor do they automatically work together. But they point toward an internet where machine access can be negotiated rather than simply allowed or blocked.

SPUR: how do you know what happened to your content?

Payment for access is one thing. But what if the commercial value of content depends on what happens after it has been retrieved?

Suppose an AI system downloads an article, uses it as evidence in an answer, cites the publisher and presents the resulting information to thousands of users. Those are several different events. Should the publisher receive one payment when the article is downloaded? Another when the content contributes to an answer? Or a share of revenue generated by the service?

Before anyone can make those arrangements, there needs to be a reliable way of describing what happened. That is the problem addressed by Content Telemetry (https://contenttelemetry.org/), stewarded by the SPUR Coalition. The standard provides a structured way to report different stages of content use, including retrieval, grounding, citation, presentation and user engagement.

This distinction matters. An article being downloaded does not necessarily mean it was used to generate an answer. And an article being used as background information does not necessarily mean the user ever saw a reference to its publisher. SPUR is attempting to create a vocabulary and reporting mechanism for those differences.

The connection with RSL 1.0 makes this particularly interesting. RSL can communicate the licensing conditions, while a referenced SPUR reporting profile can describe how relevant usage events should be reported. In principle, that allows a publisher to express both the conditions of access and the expected reporting arrangements through interoperable, machine-readable mechanisms.

It is not yet a complete commercial system, but it moves the discussion beyond simply telling AI crawlers whether they may enter a website – or not.

However, it also raises a difficult question. How can a publisher verify that an AI provider’s usage report is complete? If a platform reports that an article contributed to one hundred answers, how does the publisher know that the actual number wasn’t one thousand? A reporting standard is an important first step. Independent verification is a different problem. And without reliable verification, usage-based licensing becomes difficult to trust.

There is another missing piece: identity

This brings us to a subject that is easy to overlook. How does a publisher know who is requesting access?

A website can receive automated requests from many different sources. Some may come from search engines. Others from AI training crawlers, research tools, monitoring services, malicious scrapers or AI agents acting on behalf of paying customers. They may look surprisingly similar from the publisher’s perspective. But their intentions are very different.

Imagine a specialist publisher that wants to allow an AI agent working for an existing corporate customer to retrieve information. The publisher needs to establish whether the agent really represents that customer, whether it has permission to access the requested material and which licensing conditions apply.

That requires more than simply recognizing a bot. We need to distinguish identity, authorization and accountability. Identity establishes who is making the request, or on whose behalf it is being made. Authorization determines what that requester is allowed to do. Accountability concerns what happened afterward and whether the requester complied with the agreed conditions.

These are separate functions. An agent can have a verifiable identity without having permission to access a particular database. And a valid payment does not automatically grant unlimited rights to redistribute or train models on the retrieved material.

The emerging infrastructure for agent identity, licensing, payments and telemetry therefore needs to work together. This is precisely where open standards become important again.

A Dutch example that made me smile

During my exploration, I came across The Content Exchange, or TCE (https://tce.exchange/), a Dutch company operating a marketplace for licensing and distributing professional content. TCE is interesting because it already deals with a problem that many publishers may face in the AI era: how to make content available to other parties under commercial agreements. The company has experience with content syndication, rights and distribution. That makes it a useful organization to watch as the market for AI-accessible content develops.

But something rather amusing happened when I tried to investigate the company further. I asked an AI assistant to visit its website. The assistant couldn’t get in. The website restricted access from the automated browser. Now, that doesn’t prove TCE deliberately blocks all AI agents. The restriction could be caused by ordinary bot protection, anti-scraping measures or the particular browser environment being used.

Still, I couldn’t help smiling. Here I was, trying to investigate a company involved in licensing content, and the automated tool I was using couldn’t access its website.

It seemed like a perfect illustration of the dilemma. Publishers have good reasons to protect their information against unwanted automated collection. But they may also want to welcome legitimate AI agents that are willing to identify themselves, respect licensing conditions and pay for access. How do you distinguish between the two?

A simple choice between allowing all bots and blocking all bots is unlikely to be sufficient. The future may require something closer to a digital front door: one that lets ordinary visitors enter freely, recognizes authorized customers and can negotiate access with software agents.

Finland is also experimenting with a marketplace for media content

Another project worth following comes from Finland. The Finnish innovation fund Sitra has been exploring the idea of a marketplace where news organizations can license journalistic content and data for AI development and AI-powered services. Sitra published an explanation of the initiative in July 2026 (https://www.sitra.fi/en/articles/ai-can-create-new-business-opportunities-for-media-a-pilot-project-tests-the-marketplace-concept/).

What I find interesting is that the project doesn’t assume that simply putting a price on every article will solve the problem. The participants are investigating which kinds of content AI developers actually need, how they assess its value, what licensing arrangements are practical and how publishers can maintain control over their material.

There is also a collective dimension. A large international publisher may be able to negotiate directly with an AI company. A small independent publisher probably cannot. But what if many publishers could make their content available through a shared marketplace, with common technical and legal arrangements? That might make participation possible for organizations that would otherwise be excluded.

Unfortunately that also introduces a familiar risk. If every publisher becomes dependent on one enormous content marketplace, haven’t we simply created another platform?

Which brings us straight back to the Big Undo.

We could accidentally build the next generation of gatekeepers

This is the part of the story that worries me. The personal web movement wants to reduce dependence on enormous platforms. The emerging AI-content economy wants to create mechanisms for controlling access, negotiating licenses and collecting payments. Those goals are not necessarily incompatible. But they could become incompatible if we aren’t careful.

Imagine a future in which every AI agent must obtain its identity from one dominant provider, purchase licenses through one marketplace and use one payment network. Independent publishers might receive compensation, but they would also become dependent on the companies operating that infrastructure.

We would have solved one problem by creating another.

Or imagine that practically every website begins charging automated systems for access. Large AI companies could afford those fees. Small independent developers, researchers and community projects might not. The result could be an internet that is technically open but economically difficult to explore. That would be a strange outcome for a movement inspired by the freedom of the early web.

I don’t think the solution is to reject licensing or payments. Professional journalism, research and specialist information cost money to produce. Publishers and content owners like research organisations, universities, trade associations and others need sustainable business models. But we should be careful not to confuse open information exchange with unlimited commercial exploitation. It should be possible to publish something freely for human readers while setting different conditions for commercial AI training or large-scale automated reuse. It should also be possible to offer information under open licenses, request attribution, accept voluntary contributions or charge for specialized machine access.

Different publishers have different motivations. The infrastructure should support those differences.

Perhaps publishers will start selling knowledge, not just articles

There is another possibility that I find especially interesting. For most of my professional life, I have thought about information in terms of articles, interviews, reports and other publications. But AI agents often don’t need an entire article. They need particular pieces of reliable information.

Imagine a technical publication that has spent years reporting on data center infrastructure. Its archive contains information about cooling systems, power distribution, rack densities, standards, suppliers and installations. For a human reader, this material exists as hundreds of separate articles. For an AI agent, the archive could become a specialized knowledge resource. A publisher might make certain facts available as structured records, including sources, publication dates, technical context and licensing information.

The idea of breaking journalism down into smaller, structured units of information is not mine. Credit belongs to journalist Sannuta Raghu, who developed the concept of the News Atom. In an excellent article published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Introducing the News Atom: a metadata blueprint for journalism in the age of AI (https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/introducing-news-atom-metadata-blueprint-journalism-age-ai), she explains how individual statements in a news story can become machine-readable units that retain their meaning, sources, context, provenance and licensing information.

I find her approach fascinating, particularly because it recognizes that the value of journalism lies not simply in the words of an article, but also in the research, verification and interpretation behind those words.

However, I would like to take the idea a little further. Raghu calls these units News Atoms, which makes perfect sense in the context of journalism. But I think the principle could apply to much more than news and reported facts. Research findings, technical specifications, scientific observations, expert knowledge and many other forms of verified information could potentially be structured in similar ways. That is why I prefer the broader term Knowledge Atoms. Not as a replacement for Raghu’s original concept, but as a way of exploring how the same underlying idea might extend beyond journalism into the wider world of knowledge publishing.

Here is how that could work. An article might contain several “atoms”: a product announcement, a verified technical specification, an interview statement, a deployment location or a regulatory change. The atoms would not necessarily replace the article. The article remains valuable because it provides context, interpretation and a coherent story. But structured information could make the underlying knowledge easier for machines to find, verify and license.

This could open the door to entirely new products and business models for publishers. They could continue publishing articles for human readers, either freely available or through subscriptions, while also making the underlying knowledge available in formats designed specifically for AI systems. For example, a specialist publisher could offer access to a structured database containing verified facts, technical specifications, research findings and expert insights extracted from its reporting. AI developers or companies using AI agents could pay to access this information through an API, rather than having their systems search through hundreds of individual articles. Publishers could also offer continuously updated knowledge services, ensuring that AI applications have access to the latest verified information in a particular field. In this model, the publisher is no longer selling access only to articles, but also to the reliable, structured knowledge behind them.

That doesn’t mean every publisher should immediately start building APIs and databases. There is still a great deal we don’t know about actual customer demand, pricing and the costs of maintaining such services. But it suggests that the economic value of publishing may increasingly lie not only in the document or the article itself, but also in the reliable knowledge behind it. And that could be particularly interesting for specialist publishers, research organizations and trade associations.

So how could all these pieces fit together?

I keep imagining a relatively simple arrangement. An independent publisher maintains its own website and content archive. Human readers discover articles through search, RSS, blog directories, newsletters and social communities. Software agents can discover the same publisher’s machine-readable information, but they also encounter clearly defined licensing conditions. When an agent wants access to material requiring authorization, it identifies itself and provides the necessary credentials. If payment is required, a compatible mechanism handles the transaction. And when the agreement calls for usage reporting, a telemetry system records the relevant events.

No single company necessarily has to operate all those functions. The publisher could choose one content management system, another identity provider, a separate payment service and perhaps a collective licensing organization. Ideally, the components would be replaceable. That is the Big Undo applied to the economics of publishing.

The emerging publishing architecture

This is a conceptual architecture, not a complete system that already exists and works seamlessly. The technologies are at different stages of development. Some are established, some are experimental, and interoperability between them remains incomplete. But the pieces are beginning to become visible.

The connection I hadn’t expected

When I started exploring the Big Undo, I was thinking mainly about personal websites, independent developers and the pleasure of discovering unexpected things online. I wasn’t thinking about licensing agreements, automated payments or content telemetry. Those subjects seemed to belong to a completely different discussion.

But now I think they are closely related. The Big Undo asks how people can regain control over their software and information. The emerging content-licensing initiatives ask how creators and publishers can regain control over the economic use of their information. Both depend on a similar principle: the ability to operate independently while communicating through shared standards.

Both also face the same danger. If the solution requires everyone to join one enormous platform, we may end up reproducing the very dependencies we hoped to escape. Perhaps the most important question is therefore not whether AI companies will eventually pay publishers. It is whether the infrastructure for those payments, licenses and permissions will remain open enough for small publishers and independent developers to participate on their own terms.

And what about Just Me?

There is something slightly amusing about writing all this on a personal blog. I started Just Me because I wanted somewhere to write about things I encounter and find fascinating. Whether thousands of people read those articles has never been my main concern. I enjoy the freedom of having my own little corner of the internet.

I like discovering independent websites through services such as Bubbles. I like following links that lead somewhere unexpected. And I like experimenting with small pieces of software that do exactly what I want them to do.

I have no plans to turn Just Me into a commercial content business. But the principles matter to me. I want my writing to remain mine. I want people to be able to discover it. I want to choose the tools I use. And I don’t want my words to become permanently trapped on a platform simply because it happens to be popular today, when it could disappear as soon as next week.

In my opinion, the same principles matter (or should matter) to professional publishers, although they also need to earn enough money to continue producing reliable information. That is why I think the two developments belong in the same conversation. The personal web is exploring how to make publishing independent again. The emerging AI-content economy is exploring how to make the use of published information economically sustainable.

If both movements embrace open standards, portability and genuine choice, they could reinforce one another. If they don’t, we may simply replace one generation of internet gatekeepers with another.

I don’t know which direction things will take. But I do know that I want to keep watching the people who are building these systems. Not just the large technology companies, but also the independent developers, small publishers, open-standard communities and researchers experimenting at the edges of the internet.

Because perhaps the future of the internet won’t arrive as one enormous new platform. Perhaps it will arrive as thousands of small pieces that gradually learn how to work together. And perhaps, this time, we can also figure out how the people creating the information flowing between those pieces can share fairly in the value they produce. That would be a Big Undo worth getting excited about.

For readers who want to explore further, the key starting points are Dave Winer’s Big Undo (https://bigundo.org/), the RSL standard (https://rslstandard.org/), SPUR-related Content Telemetry (https://contenttelemetry.org/), the x402 payment protocol (https://www.x402.org/) and Sitra’s research into AI content licensing (https://www.sitra.fi/en/articles/ai-can-create-new-business-opportunities-for-media-a-pilot-project-tests-the-marketplace-concept/). On Just Me, you can find several blog posts I’ve written about these and related topics by selecting the “Publishing” and “Content Creation” categories on the left-hand side of the homepage.

AI Agents Are Getting Digital Passports. But Who Checks What They Do?

Yesterday, Bookmark Conversations, the little application I’ve been building to find unexpected connections between my bookmarked articles (see more https://justme.website/content-creation/read-later-more-like-read-never-so-i-built-bookmark-conversations/), came up with something very interesting. It connected a Cloudflare article about the growing amount of automated traffic on the internet with a technical specification from SPUR, an initiative exploring how publishers can track the use of their content by AI systems.

At first, the connection seemed fairly straightforward. If AI agents are becoming increasingly active on the web, publishers need to know who these agents are and what they’re doing with their content. But the more I looked into it, the more fascinating it became. Because there are actually two very different questions here:

How do we know who an AI agent really is?

And how can we verify what it does with the information it collects?

It turns out that quite a few people are working on the first question. The second is considerably more difficult.

Could I see your passport, please?

Imagine someone walking into a library, picking up a book and introducing themselves as a researcher from a well-known university. The librarian might be perfectly happy to help. But how does he or she know the visitor really works for that university?

Something similar happens constantly on the web. Software visiting a website can identify itself through a user-agent string. A crawler might claim to be Google’s crawler, for example, or another well-known automated service. But simply claiming an identity is not the same as proving it. And as AI agents begin doing more than collecting information, this distinction becomes increasingly important. Some agents browse websites, compare products, book services or carry out tasks on behalf of users. Others collect material that may eventually appear in AI-generated answers.

So how do we distinguish a legitimate agent from software pretending to be one? One answer is Web Bot Auth, an emerging approach being developed through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-webbotauth-httpsig-protocol/). Instead of simply announcing its identity, an automated visitor can cryptographically sign its requests. A website can then verify that the request was signed using a particular private key. It’s a little like replacing a handwritten name badge with a digitally verifiable identity document.

Of course, proving that an agent controls a particular cryptographic key doesn’t automatically tell us whether that agent is trustworthy. But it gives us something much more useful than a name that anybody can type into an HTTP request. Cloudflare is among the companies exploring and implementing this approach.

The surprising part: payment companies are interested too

I initially thought this was mainly a problem for website owners and publishers. But then I discovered that payment companies are working on remarkably similar questions. Visa has developed its Trusted Agent Protocol (https://developer.visa.com/docs/trusted-agent-protocol/trusted-agent-protocol-specifications), intended to help merchants recognise AI agents involved in shopping transactions. Mastercard is also exploring ways to establish what a customer has actually authorised an AI agent to do.

Here is what they are trying to do. If an AI assistant buys something on your behalf, a shop needs more than an assurance that the visitor is an AI agent. It needs to know who operates the agent, whether the agent is acting for a genuine customer and whether that customer authorised the purchase. That’s quite a different problem from identifying a web crawler. Yet the underlying questions are more or less the same: Who are you? Who sent you? What are you allowed to do? And can you prove it?

The FIDO Alliance (https://fidoalliance.org/), known for its work on authentication and passkeys, is also involved in discussions about securing interactions involving AI agents.

I find this development rather fascinating. We seem to be watching the early construction of something resembling a digital identity infrastructure for software that acts on its own. Not a single universal passport system, at least not yet. More a collection of standards, protocols and experiments that may eventually fit together.

And that raises another question I hadn’t initially considered: who will issue these identities, and who gets to decide which agents are trusted? I’d much prefer an open system in which a small independent website can verify an agent without depending entirely on a large technology company or government agency. Otherwise, we risk creating another layer of gatekeepers on the internet.

But what happens after the agent leaves?

This brings me back to the second part of the Bookmark Conversations discovery. Let’s imagine that an AI agent visits a news website. It identifies itself cryptographically. The publisher verifies its identity and allows it to retrieve an article.

So far, so good. But what happens next? Does the agent simply read the article to answer a question? Does it store a copy? Does it pass the information to another system? Does the article influence a generated answer without ever being quoted or linked? The publisher can’t necessarily see any of this. And that becomes particularly interesting when publishers want to license their content to AI companies.

Several initiatives are trying to create the infrastructure for such arrangements. Really Simple Licensing (https://rslstandard.org/) focuses on machine-readable licensing conditions. Cloudflare has been experimenting with Pay Per Crawl, allowing website owners to charge automated visitors for access (https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/features/pay-per-crawl/what-is-pay-per-crawl/).

SPUR (https://github.com/SPUR-Coalition/telemetry) takes another approach. Its Content Telemetry specification describes ways to report how content moves through AI systems and how it is used. When I examined SPUR more closely, I discovered that its specification already considers verified bot identities. So the original Bookmark Conversations discovery wasn’t entirely correct in suggesting that identity verification had simply been overlooked.

But it had uncovered a much more interesting issue: Knowing who collected an article is not the same as knowing what happened to that piece of content afterwards. An AI company might report that an article was used in a particular way. But can the publisher independently verify that report? That’s where things become difficult.

A receipt isn’t necessarily proof

Suppose a publisher receives a report saying that an article was retrieved 500 times and used in 30 AI-generated answers. That’s useful information. But where did those numbers come from? If they were reported by the AI provider itself, the publisher still has to trust that provider’s reporting system. Even a cryptographically signed report only proves who signed it and that it hasn’t subsequently been altered. It doesn’t automatically prove that every relevant use was recorded.

This reminds me a little of advertising measurement. For years, advertisers and publishers have wrestled with questions about impressions, clicks, attribution and independent verification. AI introduces an additional complication. An article might influence an answer without appearing in the final response. Information might pass through several services. And the distinction between retrieving content, processing it and actually using it becomes surprisingly difficult to define.

Perhaps some of these events can eventually be recorded in independently auditable systems. Perhaps trusted execution environments, cryptographic proofs or third-party measurement services will play a role. But none of these approaches should be mistaken for a complete solution. Proving what happened inside a complex AI system is very different from proving that a particular computer sent a particular HTTP request. And I suspect this distinction will become increasingly important as the market for licensing content to AI companies develops.

Two pieces of a much bigger puzzle

Interestingly, these developments are coming from different corners of the internet. Security researchers are thinking about cryptographic identities. Payment companies are working on agent authorisation. Publishers are experimenting with licensing and usage reporting. Internet standards organisations are trying to make sure the underlying technologies can work together. They aren’t necessarily building one coordinated system. But they are encountering different parts of the same problem.

The internet is gradually filling with software that can act on behalf of people and organisations. We need ways to recognise that software, establish what it is allowed to do and hold it accountable for its actions. A digital passport may help with the first part. It doesn’t automatically solve the last. And there is a rather uncomfortable possibility here: we might eventually become very good at identifying the AI agents that visit our websites while remaining surprisingly dependent on their operators to tell us what happens to our content.

One discovery, quite a few new questions

I like that this whole line of thought began with two bookmarks that decided were related. The application didn’t provide a definitive answer. In fact, one part of its original interpretation needed correcting after I checked the sources. But that’s fine. I didn’t build it to deliver unquestionable conclusions. I built it to notice connections I might otherwise miss and give me something worth investigating.

And this one certainly did. I started with a question about a technical specification for AI content telemetry. I ended up wondering whether we’re witnessing the birth of an identity system for autonomous software, and whether the people creating the content these systems consume will ever be able to verify how that content is used. And get paid for it. Not bad for a couple of bookmarks that might otherwise have remained in my read later collection forever.

Read Later? Or Read Never? So I Built Bookmark Conversations

I have a confession to make. I’m quite good at collecting interesting websites, articles and blog posts. I’m considerably less good at actually doing something with them. I suspect I’m not the only one. There are plenty of excellent bookmarking and read-later services. Pocket was a well-known example until Mozilla shut it down in 2025. Services like Raindrop.io (https://raindrop.io/), Wallabag (https://wallabag.org/) and Karakeep (https://karakeep.app/) offer different ways to collect, organise and rediscover things you’ve saved.

But there’s something about the whole concept of read later that bothers me. Far too often, it becomes read never. At least: for me. I save an article because something about it catches my attention. Perhaps it’s an unusual idea, a small open-source project, or somebody experimenting with a completely different way of using the internet. I fully intend to return to it. But then another interesting link appears. And another. Before long, I’ve built a rather impressive collection of things I may never look at again.

What if bookmarks could talk to each other?

That question eventually led me to a little experiment I’ve been building on my Linux laptop. I call it Bookmark Conversations. The idea is quite simple. Instead of treating bookmarks as individual items waiting to be read, why not treat them as a collection of ideas that might have something to say to each other?

Okay, that might sound a little abstract. Imagine saving an article about someone running a tiny personal website. A few weeks later, you bookmark something about alternative internet protocols such as Gopher or Gemini. Somewhere else in your collection is a story about people building their own little online communities. Individually, they’re interesting links. Together, they might suggest a bigger story about people trying to make the internet more personal again. That’s the kind of connection I want Bookmark Conversations to discover. A connection I might never have thought of myself.

My bookmarks are already in Obsidian a.k.a. Markdown

I use Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) to collect bookmarks, along with occasional notes about why I found something interesting. I wanted to keep doing exactly that. No new bookmarking service, no additional inbox, and certainly no need to move everything into another proprietary system.

Bookmark Conversations simply reads the bookmarks from my Obsidian vault. It retrieves the articles, analyses their contents and looks for unexpected connections, interesting contradictions or questions worth exploring. Yes, it uses AI (running locally on my laptop), but not to write summaries of everything I’ve saved. There are already plenty of tools that can do that. I’m much more interested in the relationships between things. And importantly, it doesn’t change anything in my Obsidian vault. The application is completely read-only, runs locally on my Linux machine and stores its own data separately.

A small discovery every morning

The current version runs automatically. Every morning, it checks my bookmarks, processes new material and searches for possible discoveries. Around 10 o’clock, I receive a desktop notification telling me what it found.

Sometimes there’s nothing new. That’s fine. I’d rather have no discovery than a completely artificial connection between two unrelated articles. When something interesting does appear, I can open a small dashboard to see why the application thinks the connection matters, what the original sources actually say and which questions might be worth investigating further. I can also save a discovery as a Markdown file. That means I can use it in Obsidian, develop it into a blog post, or simply keep it for another day.

A different relationship with bookmarks

Bookmark Conversations is still an experiment. I’ve been through quite a few versions already, fixing problems with retrieving articles, improving the quality of discoveries and making sure the whole thing can run unattended. It’s now in a longer test period, so I don’t yet know how useful it will prove to be. But I like the underlying idea. And there’s already a promising sign: Bookmark Conversations has found its first genuinely interesting connection between bookmarks that, at first glance, seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It’s exactly the kind of unexpected discovery I was hoping for, and one I might never have made on my own.

Most bookmarking tools help us collect information. Some help us organise it. Others remind us to read what we’ve saved. What I’m trying to build is something slightly different: a tool that helps me think with the things I’ve collected. Because maybe that’s the real problem with read later. We assume that the value of a bookmark lies in eventually reading that particular article. But maybe some of its value comes from the connections it can make with everything else we’ve discovered.

I don’t necessarily need another app telling me I have 500 unread articles. I’d much rather have one occasionally whispering: Hey, remember those two things you saved a few weeks apart? I think there’s something interesting going on here.

Why Are People Building Websites for Computers from the 1990s?

Imagine switching on a thirty-year-old computer, connecting it to the internet, and discovering that you can still create a website, read an online magazine, sign someone’s guestbook, or chat with other people. Not by visiting an archive of long-forgotten websites, but by using services that people are actively developing today. Why would anyone build something like that in 2026?

That was my first thought when I started exploring Web1.0Hosting (https://web1.0hosting.net/). It is a hosting service designed specifically to make websites accessible from old computers, operating systems, palmtops, and even mobile phones from a time when smartphones didn’t exist. You can use it with modern equipment too, of course. But the fascinating part is that modern equipment isn’t a requirement.

The service provides free hosting space, simple tools for building websites, webmail, chat, guestbooks, and other features that were once perfectly ordinary parts of the internet. It even supports WAP, the technology that allowed early mobile phones to access simplified online services (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol). And this isn’t just some experimental project with three websites maintained by a handful of nostalgic computer enthusiasts. At the time of writing, Web1.0Hosting reports hosting more than 2000 websites.

I find that quite remarkable. Here we are, living in an age of artificial intelligence, increasingly sophisticated web applications, enormous cloud platforms, and websites that sometimes seem to require a small supercomputer just to display a few paragraphs of text. Meanwhile, someone is deliberately building a hosting service that works on a computer from 1995.

But the more I explored, the more I realised that this isn’t really a story about old computers.

An online magazine that doesn’t believe in endless upgrades

One of the projects associated with Web1.0Hosting is ELPiS Magazine (http://elpis.ws/), a small digital publication devoted to Web 1.0, the small web, the indie web, and other interesting corners of the internet. ELPiS published its first issue in October 2024 and has since developed into a continuing publication. The magazine looks refreshingly old-fashioned, with a simple layout, straightforward navigation, and pages that work on old as well as modern computers.

What caught my attention was the philosophy behind the magazine. Its creator explains that technological development doesn’t necessarily have to mean constantly upgrading software, replacing hardware, or adding more complexity. Instead, people should be able to choose the technologies that actually work for them, rather than simply accepting whatever the technology industry decides they ought to use.

It’s a rather different way of thinking about technological progress. Usually, we discuss technology in terms of what comes next: faster processors, more capable AI systems, new software platforms, and additional functionality. We rarely ask whether we actually need all those improvements. ELPiS raises that question without suggesting that everyone should abandon modern technology and retreat to an old computer in the attic.

There is another aspect of this magazine that I particularly like. In issue eight (https://elpis.ws/cgi-bin/cms/zine_may_25), the creator explains that there is no real editorial plan. Articles appear because someone feels the need to write them. The magazine doesn’t seem particularly concerned with publishing schedules, audience growth, or turning every article into a commercial opportunity.

I recognise something of my own approach to Just Me in that. I started this blog because I enjoy writing about things I discover and find fascinating. Whether a post attracts five readers or five hundred isn’t really the point. Writing it, exploring the subject, and perhaps sharing something interesting with another person is already rewarding. And apparently, there are more people who think that way.

The return of the handmade website

Following the links from ELPiS and Web1.0Hosting leads to a surprisingly lively world of people building their own websites. There is Neocities (https://neocities.org/), for example, where people create personal websites, often using relatively simple HTML and CSS. And there is Nekoweb (https://nekoweb.org/), another platform that encourages people to build and customise their own little pieces of the internet.

Some of these websites look as though they have travelled directly from 1997. Colourful backgrounds, animated GIFs, tiny buttons, strange navigation menus, and pages devoted to subjects that would probably never survive a professional website design meeting. Others are surprisingly elegant, minimalist, and modern. What they have in common is that their creators appear to enjoy the process of making something themselves.

A website can be about someone’s favourite computer game, a collection of photographs, an obscure musical genre, a fictional world, or absolutely nothing in particular. It doesn’t have to attract visitors, generate advertising revenue, or become part of a larger business. And it certainly doesn’t have to please an algorithm.

Something else caught my attention here. On 24 October 2026, a new magazine called INDIEWEB (https://indieweb.nekoweb.org/articles/welcome-to-indieweb/) published its first article. It is devoted to what the editors call the hand-built web. They explain that they kept discovering wonderful personal websites but didn’t have a good place to share them. So they created their own publication.

The magazine celebrates the sort of things that have largely disappeared from mainstream web culture: hand-coded pages, guestbooks, webrings, pixel art, and those tiny 88×31-pixel buttons people once used to link to their favourite websites. It even has an edition that readers can browse online or print and turn into a physical zine.

That last detail made me smile, because I’ve recently been exploring the world of zines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zine) myself. Small, independently produced publications are still very much alive, and apparently the people rediscovering the handmade web are also rediscovering ways of publishing that existed long before the internet.

These worlds seem to overlap quite naturally. Both are about making something yourself, sharing it with others, and finding satisfaction in the process rather than measuring success in terms of audience size or commercial potential.

Sometimes an old protocol is enough

The deeper I went into this world, the more familiar names I encountered. For example, ELPiS publishes articles about Gopher (https://gopher.floodgap.com/), the internet protocol that predates the widespread popularity of the World Wide Web. I’ve written about Gopher before on Just Me, partly because I find it fascinating that people are still actively using and maintaining such a simple system for distributing information.

There is also Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/), a much newer protocol designed to provide a deliberately lightweight alternative to the complexity of the modern web. Gemini isn’t intended to replace everything the web can do. It focuses on something much simpler: reading, publishing, and navigating information without the enormous technical machinery that often accompanies modern websites. I’ve explored Gemini on Just Me as well (for example here: https://justme.website/tech/there-is-more-to-the-internet-than-the-web/).

Gopher and Gemini aren’t identical, and neither is simply an attempt to recreate the internet of the 1990s. But both demonstrate something interesting. You don’t necessarily need JavaScript frameworks, elaborate user interfaces, tracking systems, or enormous software platforms to share information with other people. Sometimes a document and a link are sufficient.

Of course, that simplicity has limitations. There are excellent reasons why today’s web supports rich applications, interactive services, accessibility features, and multimedia experiences. Nobody seriously needs to suggest that we should give all of that up. But perhaps we have become so accustomed to increasing complexity that we’ve stopped questioning whether it is always necessary. Why should a page containing a thousand words of text need so much technology?

And then Yggdrasil appears

One of the more unexpected details of Web1.0Hosting is that websites hosted on the service are also published through Yggdrasil (https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/). That was a familiar name. I’ve already written about Yggdrasil on Just Me, and I certainly didn’t expect to encounter it again while exploring websites designed for thirty-year-old computers (for more on Yggdrasil, see here: https://justme.website/tech/what-if-your-friends-were-your-cloud/).

Yggdrasil is an experimental decentralised networking project. It allows computers to connect through an encrypted, peer-to-peer routing system. The project explores ways of building networks that don’t depend on the same centralised routing structures we generally associate with the internet. It is important to distinguish this from anonymity networks such as Tor. Yggdrasil isn’t designed to guarantee anonymity. Its primary focus is decentralised networking and routing.

Now consider what Web1.0Hosting is doing. On the one hand, it supports browsers and devices from the 1990s. On the other, it makes websites accessible through an experimental decentralised network. Old and new technologies, working together.

I think that’s a particularly revealing combination. These people aren’t necessarily trying to return to the past. They are quite happy to experiment with new technology. They just don’t accept that new technology must automatically replace everything that came before it. They are choosing which technologies make sense for the things they want to do.

And that, I suspect, is the more important story here.

Perhaps this is about changing our expectations

The more I explore these projects, the more I get the impression that something broader is happening. Not necessarily a large, organised movement and certainly not a revolution. The people building personal websites, publishing small magazines, experimenting with alternative internet protocols, and keeping old computers online have different interests and motivations. Some are motivated by nostalgia. Others enjoy the technical challenge. Some care about privacy, independence, accessibility, or reducing the resources needed to run digital services. And some simply enjoy making things. But many of their activities point towards a similar idea.

At the same time, people are beginning to reconsider not just which digital technologies they use, but what they expect those technologies to do in the first place.

We have become accustomed to the idea that digital services should continually grow. More features, more users, more automation, more personalisation, more integration, more engagement. A personal website should become a professional publication. A small community should grow into a platform. A useful application should acquire dozens of additional features. And sooner or later, almost everything is expected to become a business.

But what if someone doesn’t want any of that? What if a website with twenty regular visitors is exactly what its creator wants? What if a digital magazine doesn’t need a publishing strategy? What if someone prefers a simple text-based service because it does precisely what they need? Or what if an old computer is still useful and enjoyable, even though the technology industry stopped supporting it twenty years ago?

I find those questions increasingly interesting. They also connect with other things I’ve been exploring on Just Me. Communities built around personal websites rather than social media platforms. People exchanging zines simply because they enjoy sharing their ideas. Alternative ways of discovering interesting websites without relying on recommendation algorithms. Even people deliberately choosing devices and applications that do less rather than more. Individually, these may seem like unrelated hobbies or technical experiments. Taken together, they suggest a different relationship with digital technology.

Smaller doesn’t necessarily mean worse

There is a temptation to romanticise the early internet. I occasionally fall into that trap myself. But the internet of the 1990s wasn’t some perfect digital paradise. Connections were slow, websites were frequently broken, finding information could be difficult, and many services were inaccessible or frustrating to use. And let’s not pretend that every personal website was a masterpiece of thoughtful design. Some were practically impossible to read.

Today’s web has brought enormous improvements, and I wouldn’t want to lose them. Nor does a simple website automatically mean a more accessible, secure, or privacy-friendly website. Those things still require careful decisions.

What interests me is something else. The people behind these projects seem unwilling to accept that technological progress can only move in one direction. They are experimenting with the possibility that less functionality might sometimes be enough, that small communities can be perfectly satisfying, and that older technologies can remain valuable alongside newer ones. Perhaps a website doesn’t need to do everything. Perhaps it doesn’t need to grow. Perhaps it doesn’t even need an audience. And perhaps the freedom to make those decisions is a form of digital autonomy that deserves more attention.

The internet is still (once again?) a place to experiment

I started this little exploration wondering why anyone would build a hosting service for computers from the 1990s. I’ve ended up thinking about something much bigger. We talk a great deal about digital autonomy in terms of governments, cloud providers, infrastructure, legislation, and the dominance of large technology companies. Those are important discussions, and I follow them closely in my professional work.

But there is also a much more personal version of digital autonomy. It is the freedom to build a website that looks exactly the way you want it to look. To publish something without worrying about how many people will read it. To continue using a piece of technology because you like it, rather than replacing it because someone has decided it is obsolete. And to experiment with ideas that might never become commercially successful or technologically fashionable.

I don’t know whether the small web will grow into something much bigger. Perhaps it will always remain a collection of relatively small communities, maintained by people who enjoy doing things differently. That would be perfectly fine too. In fact, I suspect many of them would prefer it that way. After all, not everything on the internet needs to become the next big thing. Sometimes a small website is all you need.

(And for those wondering who the young woman in the illustration accompanying this blog post is… Yes, that’s Mara! She’ll be back this weekend with another blog post of her own here on Just Me.)

What If AI Paid for Information Instead of Articles?

A few new developments suggest that the idea of paying journalists and publishers for the information AI uses is becoming a little less theoretical.

Last week, I published a rather long post called What If AI Had to Pay for the Web It Reads? (https://justme.website/content-creation/what-if-ai-had-to-pay-for-the-web-it-reads/) In it, I explored several initiatives that might eventually help journalists, publishers and other content creators get paid when AI systems use their work. We looked at x402, a protocol that allows software to make payments automatically, and News Atom, which proposes making individual pieces of journalistic information understandable to machines. I also discussed Sitra’s experiment with a marketplace for licensing journalistic content to AI developers, along with initiatives such as RSL, Cloudflare, TollBit and SPUR.

Although these projects approach the problem from different directions, they all touch on the same question: if AI companies increasingly depend on information produced by others, shouldn’t some of the money they make find its way back to the people who created that information?

A few interesting developments have emerged since I wrote that post. One new research paper in particular caught my attention because it takes the discussion beyond simply paying for access to articles. Instead, it asks how we might determine the economic value of the information contained in those articles, and how that value should be distributed among the people and organisations responsible for producing it.

What exactly are we paying for?

On October 21, a group of researchers published a paper titled Paying for Information, Not for Clicks: A Block-Level Publisher Content Marketplace for AI Answers (https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30324). The title almost says it all. Rather than paying publishers for website visits or even for access to complete articles, the researchers propose a system in which publishers receive compensation for the actual information that contributes to AI-generated answers.

They introduce the idea of lego blocks: individual pieces of information, such as facts, figures, observations or statements. An article might contain dozens of these blocks, and several publications might contain the same information. The challenge is determining who should receive compensation when an AI system uses one or more of those blocks.

Imagine a journalist discovering that a major technology company is planning to build a new data center in the Netherlands. The journalist investigates the project, verifies the information and publishes an article containing details about its location, investment, power capacity and expected completion date. A few hours later, other publications report the same news. Some add useful information of their own, while others largely repeat the original reporting.

Now imagine someone asking an AI assistant how much capacity the planned data center will have. The assistant retrieves several articles, combines the available information and produces an answer. Who should get paid? The publication that originally discovered the project? Every publisher whose article was consulted? Or only those publications that contributed information the AI could not have obtained elsewhere?

These are not merely philosophical questions. They determine how money might be distributed in a future marketplace for journalistic information.

Three ways to divide the money

The researchers developed a framework for comparing three approaches to distributing payments. The first divides the payment equally among publishers that provide the same information. The second rewards the publisher that reported the information first. The third considers how indispensable a particular contribution was. If removing one source would make certain information unavailable, that source receives more credit.

I find the second and third approaches particularly interesting because journalism is about much more than publishing information. A substantial part of its value comes from discovering things that weren’t previously known, checking whether claims are accurate and adding context that others have missed. If an original investigation costs thousands of euros while repeating its findings takes ten minutes, should both activities receive the same compensation?

There is, however, an important complication. The publication that reports something first is not necessarily the one that reports it most accurately. Another journalist might later discover that the original information was incomplete or even incorrect. Rewarding originality makes sense, but accuracy, verification and corrections should remain part of the equation.

The researchers tested their framework using AI-generated answers to 1974 search queries concerning a heavily covered news event. Their results suggest that the method used to distribute payments can make a measurable difference. Under an equal-sharing model, established publishers with substantial news-gathering operations received 42% of the allocated value. When the model rewarded first publication, their share increased to between 46% and 50%, depending on how publication times were interpreted.

Another finding may be even more significant. When researchers examined only the articles retrieved by an AI system for a particular question, many pieces of information appeared unique. Determining who originally published something required a much broader record of the available journalism. A fair payment system might therefore need a shared information index that knows not only what information exists, but also where it first appeared and how it subsequently developed.

Remember News Atom?

That sounds like quite an undertaking. But it also reminded me of something from my previous post. In that post, I discussed News Atom (https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/introducing-news-atom-metadata-blueprint-journalism-age-ai), a proposal developed by journalist Sannuta Raghu. The idea is to make journalism understandable to machines without losing the information that gives it credibility. An individual piece of information could carry metadata describing its source, publication date, verification status, context and licensing conditions.

Now consider that alongside the new research. News Atom addresses how journalistic information might be represented and described, while the researchers are asking how its economic value could be attributed and distributed. These are different problems, but they fit together rather nicely.

Imagine a future system in which an AI agent can identify a particular piece of information, determine where it originated, establish whether it has been verified, understand the licensing conditions and pay for using it. If several publishers contributed to that information, the payment could be distributed according to an agreed set of rules. That would be very different from today’s situation, where AI services can produce answers based on numerous sources while the original creators may receive little more than a citation, if they receive one at all.

Of course, there are still enormous practical difficulties. Who maintains the shared information index? How do we identify two statements that express the same fact in different words? How do we distinguish original reporting from repetition? And who decides which publisher made the most valuable contribution?

There is also a legal distinction worth remembering. Facts themselves are not necessarily protected by copyright. The commercial value may instead lie in the reporting, verification, structured datasets and services that make those facts available. The research doesn’t solve all these problems, but it does provide a framework for examining them.

What interests me most is that we are beginning to look beyond the traditional article as the basic unit of journalism. Perhaps the information gathered and verified during the reporting process has an economic value of its own, even when it is used outside the article in which it originally appeared.

Mastercard is teaching AI Agents to pay

While researchers are investigating how to value information, payment companies are developing the technology that might eventually allow AI systems to purchase it.

On October 20, Mastercard demonstrated Agent Pay for Machines (https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/news-and-trends/press/2026/october/Mastercard-Agent-Pay-for-Machines-in-action.html), a payment system that builds on x402. The demonstration took place during Cloudflare Connect, an event organised by Cloudflare. It showed how an AI agent could discover digital services, pay for them and continue working without requiring human approval for every transaction.

In the demonstration, a marketing agency asked an AI agent to help prepare a campaign for a protein bar. The agent purchased social media research from one provider and generated eight campaign images through another. In total, it completed nine payments involving two suppliers, all within an approved budget.

The system uses digitally signed payment vouchers, allowing transactions to be grouped and settled later rather than processing every tiny payment individually. That is important because handling thousands of micropayments separately could become expensive and inefficient. Mastercard has also opened an Early Access programme for developers interested in experimenting with the technology.

The demonstration had nothing to do with journalism, of course. But imagine replacing the social media research provider with a specialist news database, an independent research publication or a service offering verified information about industrial technologies. An AI agent researching a particular subject could purchase exactly the information it needs, without requiring a subscription or a separate commercial agreement with every provider. That is essentially the idea behind x402, but the Mastercard demonstration shows how the concept might become part of a broader payment infrastructure.

It doesn’t prove that AI companies will start paying journalists, nor does it mean the technology is already widely available. But it does make machine-to-machine payments considerably more tangible. And when you combine that with research into information-level compensation, you can begin to see how the different pieces might eventually fit together.

But who actually controls the content?

There is another side to this story, and it is considerably less encouraging. While researchers and technology companies are developing ways to pay for information, publishers are still arguing with major platforms about whether their content can be collected and used without permission.

The latest example involves Meta. In October, the company introduced revised commercial terms that raised concerns among publishers and legal experts. The original wording appeared to give Meta broad permission to collect content from websites linked to business accounts using Meta’s services and to use that content to develop or train its products.

Meta subsequently changed the language, removing explicit references to training. Critics argued, however, that the revised terms still left too much room for the company to collect and use publishers’ content. Publishers and advertisers in Europe and the United Kingdom asked competition authorities to intervene, and on October 23 Meta postponed the introduction of the new terms from October 30 to November 20.

Meta disputes the criticism. The company says the changes do not grant new rights to scrape websites and that website owners can continue using robots.txt to communicate their preferences. The dispute is described in more detail by Nieman Journalism Lab(https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta-delays-rollout-of-terms-that-would-allow-broad-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-are-still-skeptical/).

I find this development interesting because it illustrates how far we still have to go. On the one hand, we are discussing sophisticated systems that could identify individual pieces of information and compensate the people who produced them. On the other, publishers are still trying to establish something much more basic: who gets to decide how their content is used? Without clear agreements about permissions and licensing, payment technology alone won’t solve much.

A marketplace needs more than a payment button

In my previous post, I also discussed the Finnish innovation fund Sitra (https://www.sitra.fi/en/articles/ai-can-create-new-business-opportunities-for-media-a-pilot-project-tests-the-marketplace-concept/), which is experimenting with a marketplace for journalistic content. The idea is that publishers could collectively make their information available to AI developers under agreed licensing conditions.

That could be especially interesting for smaller publishers. A large newspaper might be able to negotiate directly with an AI company, but a small specialist publication probably cannot. A shared marketplace could make its information discoverable and commercially accessible alongside content from hundreds of other publishers.

The new research suggests that such a marketplace might eventually need to do more than simply sell access to articles. It could also require information about where particular facts originated, whether reporting was original or repeated, and how payments should be distributed when several publishers contribute to an AI-generated answer.

That brings us back to the initiatives discussed in my earlier post. News Atom could help describe the information, while RSL (https://rslstandard.org/) could communicate licensing conditions. SPUR (https://www.spurcoalition.org/) is working on standards for tracking how publishers’ content is used, and x402 and related payment systems could handle transactions. Marketplaces such as the one Sitra is exploring could connect buyers and sellers.

None of these initiatives currently forms a complete, integrated solution, and there is no guarantee that they will eventually work together. Nevertheless, I find it fascinating that different organisations are beginning to address the separate components of what could become a new economic infrastructure for journalism.

There is also a question of scale. A marketplace might make sense for large news organisations with extensive archives, but could it also work for independent journalists, small specialist publishers, research institutes and other organisations that produce valuable information? That is where I think the real opportunity lies. A market that only benefits the largest publishers would do little to change the existing balance of power. A system that allows smaller content creators to participate on reasonable terms could be considerably more interesting.

And what about the Independent Web?

There is one concern I keep coming back to. I don’t want the web to become a place where every piece of information has a price tag. One of the reasons I love the IndieWeb is that people share things simply because they want to. They write about their hobbies, document experiments, publish tutorials and tell stories that might interest only a handful of readers. There is no business plan behind every post, and nobody expects every page to generate revenue. I certainly don’t want to lose that.

But I also don’t see why sharing something freely with human readers should automatically mean that commercial AI services can use it without any conditions. Those are two different things, and I think we should be able to treat them differently.

A personal website could remain completely open to human readers while offering paid access to commercial AI agents. A specialist publisher could sell verified information through an API while continuing to publish ordinary articles. A research institute could make certain findings publicly available while licensing structured datasets for commercial applications. And perhaps a journalist could eventually receive compensation not just when someone reads an article, but also when an AI service uses a piece of original reporting.

Whether any of this becomes economically significant remains to be seen. The research is still experimental, the payment systems are developing and commercial demand for paid journalistic information has yet to be demonstrated at scale.

There is also a risk that large publishers, payment providers and technology platforms end up controlling this new market, leaving independent creators with little more influence than they have today. That would be rather disappointing (to say the least), especially when the underlying technologies offer the possibility of a more open and accessible system.

Maybe we are finally asking the right questions

When I wrote my previous post, I was mainly interested in whether AI companies could be made to pay for the web content they use. Maybe there is an even more interesting question: what exactly is the value of journalistic information, and how do we make sure that value reaches the people who created it?

A payment protocol such as x402 can help move money between machines, but it cannot determine who deserves that money. That requires information about sources, originality, verification, licensing and actual usage. It will probably also require considerable cooperation between publishers, researchers, technology companies and standards organisations.

The latest developments certainly don’t mean we have solved the problem. There are still technical, legal and commercial obstacles, and we have very little evidence about how much money such systems might eventually generate.

But the discussion is becoming more interesting. Instead of arguing only about whether AI companies should pay publishers, we are beginning to examine what they should pay for, how those payments could work and who should receive them.

And that is something I intend to keep following. Because I still believe AI can create wonderful opportunities for journalism and the independent web. I’d just like the people who make that web worth reading to benefit from those opportunities too.

You Can’t Search for Something You Don’t Know Exists

I love wandering around the IndieWeb. Reading personal blogs, following links, ending up on websites I’ve never visited before. Quite often, I find something interesting. Sometimes something completely unexpected. Like Ethiojazz.

I was browsing Bubbles (https://bubbles.town/) when I came across a blog post about Ethiojazz (https://www.rousette.org.uk/archives/ethiojazz/). I’d never heard of it. But the story sounded interesting, so I clicked through and started reading.

Apparently, there’s a fascinating musical history here, involving Ethiopian folk music, jazz, funk and even Armenian influences. Now, that’s not exactly a combination I would have come up with myself. So, naturally, I had to hear what it sounded like. And what wonderful music! I ended up listening to several tracks, wondering how something this good had managed to escape my attention all these years.

But what struck me most wasn’t just the music. It was how I’d found it. Because seriously, how would I ever have thought to search for Ethiojazz? And that, to me, is one of the nicest things about the IndieWeb. Think about it. We have search engines that can find almost anything. Spotify and YouTube offer us millions of songs. AI can answer just about any question we throw at it. But there’s a catch. You have to know what to ask. Or at least have some idea of what you’re looking for. Sure, there are recommendation engines that try to introduce you to music you might like. But in a way, they tend to give you more of the same. Listen to a particular hip-hop artist, and they’ll suggest other hip-hop artists. Enjoy some old-school soul, and they’ll recommend similar songs. That’s all fine, of course. But it doesn’t necessarily help you discover something completely different.

I could have searched for Ethiopian jazz. But why would I? I didn’t even know it existed. There’s something special about discovering something through another person’s blog. Someone, somewhere, happens to be interested in a particular subject. They write about it because they find it fascinating. Not necessarily because it’s trending, because people are searching for it, or because it might attract thousands of visitors. They simply want to share something they enjoy. And then, through a place like Bubbles, that little piece of enthusiasm finds its way to me.

A whole world of strange combinations

My discovery of Ethiojazz also made me curious about other unusual combinations of musical traditions. And there are plenty. There’s Anatolian rock, for example, which combines Turkish folk music with psychedelic rock. Listen to Altın Gün (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt%C4%B1n_G%C3%BCn) and you’ll hear traditional Turkish melodies played with electric guitars and a distinctly seventies sound. Or take Mongolian folk metal. Yes, that’s a thing. The Hu (https://www.thehuofficial.com/) combine traditional Mongolian instruments and throat singing with heavy metal. It sounds like an unlikely combination, but it works remarkably well. Then there’s desert blues, with musicians such as Tinariwen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinariwen) and Mdou Moctar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdou_Moctar), whose music brings together Saharan musical traditions and electric guitar sounds. And what about digital cumbia (https://www.melodigging.com/genre/digital-cumbia), where Latin American dance rhythms meet electronic music? I could go on.

The interesting thing isn’t necessarily that these combinations exist. Musicians have always borrowed ideas from other cultures and musical traditions. That’s how music develops. What fascinates me is how much wonderful music is out there that I have never encountered. And how easily I might have missed it altogether.

This is what I love about personal websites

For me, this little musical adventure illustrates something much bigger. The web has become incredibly good at helping us find things. Search engines, social media platforms and recommendation systems are constantly trying to figure out what we want. And quite often, they’re right.

But I don’t always want more of what I already like. Sometimes I want to be surprised. I want to read about something that has absolutely nothing to do with my usual interests. That’s where personal websites and the IndieWeb come in. One day, someone writes about a strange programming language. Another person explains how they repaired a forty-year-old computer. Someone else shares photographs of an abandoned railway station. And another blogger introduces me to Ethiopian jazz. None of these people needs to know who I am. They don’t need to analyse my interests or predict what I might click on. They’re simply sharing something. And I’m free to follow my curiosity.

I also like that these discoveries don’t necessarily lead anywhere useful. I don’t need to turn Ethiojazz into a project, learn to play an Ethiopian instrument or become an expert on the history of African jazz. I can simply enjoy the music.

Leave some room for the unexpected

I spend a lot of time experimenting with AI, websites, RSS and other digital tools. I’m fascinated by what technology makes possible, especially when it helps people create and publish things themselves. But the more I experiment with technology, the more I appreciate the wonderfully unpredictable nature of personal blogs. Not everything needs to be recommended to me because it matches my profile. Not every interesting discovery needs to be the result of a clever algorithm. Sometimes all it takes is someone writing enthusiastically about something I know absolutely nothing about. And someone else making that post easy to discover.

That’s exactly what happened with Ethiojazz. I didn’t wake up thinking I should explore Ethiopian jazz. I didn’t even know it existed. Someone wrote about it on their personal blog, Bubbles brought that blog to my attention, and suddenly I had a whole new world of music to explore. That’s what I love about the IndieWeb. You never quite know what you’ll find.

What If the Best Things on the Web Are the Things We Never Search For?

Maybe I’m mistaken, but something interesting seems to be happening with web search. More and more people appear to be looking for alternatives to Google and other mainstream search engines. Not necessarily because they dislike Google, but because they’re looking for something different. And I’m not talking about privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo. Those are interesting too, of course, but what I’m seeing goes a little further.

People are experimenting with search engines that focus on small, independent websites. Others are bringing back old-fashioned web directories, collecting interesting links by hand, or building tools that send you to a completely random website. Some are even using AI to find websites they would otherwise never have encountered.

What interests me most is that these people aren’t necessarily trying to find better answers to their questions. They’re trying to discover things they didn’t know existed. And I think there’s an important difference.

How do you search for something you don’t know exists?

I recently wrote about discovering Ethiojazz (https://www.rousette.org.uk/archives/ethiojazz/), a wonderful combination of musical influences I had never really explored before. I came across it through Bubbles (https://bubbles.town/), which led me to someone else’s blog. I wasn’t searching for Ethiojazz. In fact, I wouldn’t even have known what to search for. Someone else had discovered something interesting, written about it, and shared it. Through a series of links, it eventually reached me.

Of course, recommendation algorithms can introduce us to new things. But they usually start with what they already know about us. Listen to a particular metal band and you’ll probably get recommendations for similar bands. Enjoy old-school jazz and you’ll be offered more of it. Nothing wrong with that. But it does mean we’re often being shown variations of things we already like. What about the things we don’t know we like yet?

The return of the small search engine

I’ve been collecting examples of alternative approaches to web search, and there are quite a few interesting ones. One is Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/), which pays particular attention to the smaller, less commercial parts of the web. Its results can feel quite different from those of a mainstream search engine. Another is Wiby (https://wiby.me/), which focuses on simple, old-fashioned websites. It even has a surprise function that takes you somewhere unexpected.

Then there’s Kagi Small Web (https://kagi.com/smallweb/), which brings together thousands of independent blogs and personal websites. Rather than entering a search query, you can simply browse recent posts or click through to another website. Kagi has expanded this project with categories and tools that make exploring easier. And there are more. Search My Site (https://searchmysite.net/) for example focuses on independent websites, while Feedle (https://feedle.world/) lets you search blogs and podcasts.

I also came across this collection of search engines for wandering (https://www.are.na/elan-kiderman-ullendorff/search-engines-for-wandering) on Are.na and an interesting article about folk search engines (https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/folk-search-engines). That last description is rather nice, isn’t it? Folk search engines.

The common theme is that these projects are trying to make parts of the web visible that don’t necessarily perform well in conventional search results. Not because those websites are less interesting, but because they may have little search engine optimization, few incoming links, no marketing budget and no particular interest in attracting large amounts of traffic. They’re simply websites made by people who have something to share.

Remember when we just wandered around the web?

There’s another category of tools that takes this a step further. Instead of helping you search, they help you wander. Cloudhiker (https://cloudhiker.net/) sends visitors to unusual and interesting websites. Indieblog page(https://indieblog.page/) lets you discover random independent blogs. And Neocities (https://neocities.org/browse) is full of personal websites, experimental designs and projects that probably wouldn’t survive a meeting with a professional web design consultant.

These projects remind me of the early days of the web, when clicking a link could take you almost anywhere. You’d start by reading about computers, follow a few links, and suddenly find yourself on a website about someone collecting vintage radios in their garage. You hadn’t planned to spend twenty minutes learning about vintage radios. But you did. And you enjoyed it.

Today, much of our online experience is designed to eliminate that kind of uncertainty. Search engines try to give us the most relevant result. AI tools increasingly provide the answer directly, sometimes removing the need to visit a website at all. Very convenient, obviously. But efficiency isn’t always what I’m looking for when I’m browsing the web. Sometimes I want to get lost.

Perhaps we need more humans in search

Another development I find interesting is the return of the human-curated web directory. Remember those? Before search engines became so dominant, people collected websites and organized them into categories.

There are modern versions of that idea, including ooh directory (https://ooh.directory/), Blogroll.org (https://blogroll.org/) and the many directories listed by the Indieweb community (https://indieweb.org/directory). And let’s not forget blogrolls and webrings. Both are wonderfully simple concepts. Someone maintains a list of websites they enjoy, or a group of websites links to one another, allowing visitors to move from one to the next. No complicated algorithm required.

What makes these approaches interesting is that they introduce another person’s curiosity into the process. I may not know anything about experimental electronic music, forgotten programming languages or unusual types of photography. But somebody else does. And if that person maintains a blogroll or shares interesting links, I can benefit from their curiosity. That’s how we end up discovering things we would never have thought to search for ourselves.

RSS could become a discovery engine

Anyone who has read this blog before knows that I’m a big fan of RSS. For me, RSS has always been a practical way to follow websites without depending on social media platforms or recommendation algorithms. I decide which sources I want to follow, and their new posts appear in my reader.

But perhaps I’ve been thinking about RSS too narrowly. Normally, we use RSS to follow sources we already know. What if we used it to discover sources we don’t know? There are projects such as PowRSS (https://powrss.com/) that are worth exploring in this context. Kagi Small Web also offers RSS feeds, and various directories and independent websites publish feeds of their own.

Imagine combining feeds from dozens of independent blogs, directories and interesting corners of the IndieWeb. Instead of showing every new post, a small tool could select a handful of articles each day. And here’s the important bit: it shouldn’t simply select articles that match my existing interests. I’d rather have it show me something unexpected. Maybe an article about an obscure computer from the 1980s. Or someone building a homemade musical instrument. Or a personal website written in a language I don’t speak, covering a subject I’ve never heard of.

I might ignore most of them. That’s fine. The occasional unexpected discovery would make the whole thing worthwhile.

Could AI help us get lost?

This is where things become particularly interesting to me. I’m a big fan of AI, and I use it for all sorts of projects, including coding and experimenting with websites and journalism tools. Most discussions about AI and search focus on making information easier to find. Ask a question, get an answer, preferably without having to read ten different websites.

But what if we turned that around? Instead of asking AI to answer a question, we could ask it to find questions we haven’t thought of asking. Or websites we didn’t know existed. For example, I could ask an AI tool to find fifteen small, independently maintained websites about unusual technology projects. Preferably from different countries, written in different languages, and without the usual big technology publications.

Or I could ask it to find surprising connections between old computer technology, music and DIY electronics. Of course, AI isn’t automatically good at this. It can recommend the same familiar websites over and over again, and sometimes it invents links that don’t exist. So actual web searching and verification would still be necessary.

But combine AI with RSS feeds, independent web directories and collections of manually selected websites, and suddenly you have the ingredients for a rather interesting discovery engine. I already experiment with local AI models, RSS and scripts for collecting information from websites around the world. Building something like this wouldn’t be completely outside the sort of projects I enjoy.

Perhaps I should give it a try. A script could collect links from different sources, use a small local model to identify unusual or surprising subjects, and present five completely different websites every morning. Not a personalized recommendation engine designed to give me more of what I already like. Quite the opposite. A recommendation engine designed to occasionally get things wonderfully wrong.

Maybe search doesn’t always need to be better

Perhaps we’ve become so focused on finding the right answer that we’re overlooking another reason to explore the web. Curiosity.

The interesting thing about all these small search engines, directories, random website tools, blogrolls and RSS experiments is that they make room for things we weren’t looking for. They remind us that the web isn’t just an enormous collection of answers waiting for our questions. It’s also millions of people making things, writing things, experimenting, sharing ideas and connecting subjects in ways we might never have imagined.

Sometimes the most interesting website isn’t the one that best matches our search query. It’s the one we would never have searched for in the first place. Maybe that’s something worth rediscovering.

My Laptop, My Canvas: The Curious Art of Stickerbombing

I keep coming across photos of laptops that are almost completely covered in stickers. Sometimes there are just a handful. Sometimes there are dozens, overlapping each other until you can barely recognise the laptop underneath. And I have to admit, I rather like them.

Recently, I came across this wonderful stickerbombed ThinkPad T480 (https://drkhsh.at/posts/2026/01/stickerbombed-thinkpad-t480/). It made me realise that there is something rather fascinating about people turning an ordinary laptop into what almost looks like a little piece of art.

I’m not talking about modifying gaming computers with colourful lighting, transparent cases or elaborate cooling systems. Just ordinary laptops. ThinkPads, MacBooks, Dell Latitudes and whatever else people happen to use. So I started looking into it. And as it turns out, there is quite a story behind those stickers.

This is nothing new

First of all, decorating laptops with stickers is hardly a recent invention. People have been doing it for decades. Long before Instagram, TikTok or the current fascination with personalising everything, programmers, hackers, students and other computer enthusiasts were already covering their laptops with stickers.

In the hacker community, particularly, stickers have been part of the culture for a very long time. Visit a hacker conference and you’ll probably find plenty of laptops advertising Linux distributions, programming languages, security tools, obscure projects and jokes that only a handful of people understand. Some stickers are collected at conferences. Others come from friends, open-source projects or organisations people support. And of course, there are those who simply think a particular sticker looks cool.

In an interesting Computer Weekly article (https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/A-sticky-story-How-and-why-hackers-love-stickers-on-laptops), several security professionals explain why stickers became so popular among hackers. One explanation caught my attention. When you’re a programmer, much of what you create is invisible to the outside world. Your work exists somewhere inside a computer. Stickers offer a way to make some of that otherwise invisible world visible. I like that explanation.

A little piece of your identity

But what exactly is stickerbombing? Is it an art form? A way of communicating? A personal statement? Or simply decoration? I think it’s a bit of everything.

There is certainly an artistic element to it. Some people carefully arrange stickers into beautiful compositions. Others deliberately overlap them, creating a colourful mess that somehow works surprisingly well. But I suspect that for many people, the stickers themselves are more important than the final composition. A sticker from a conference you attended five years ago. A band you used to listen to. A political statement. A programming language you particularly like. A cartoon that makes you laugh. A tiny logo from an open-source project you once contributed to.

Individually, these stickers might not mean much to a stranger. Together, however, they tell a story. In fact, I came across a fascinating project at the University of Zurich (https://dlf.uzh.ch/sites/laptopstickers/) where students documented people’s laptops and interviewed their owners about the stickers. What I particularly liked was that the researchers didn’t just look at the images. They wanted to understand why people had chosen those particular stickers and what they meant to them. Sometimes the answer was deeply personal. Sometimes political. Sometimes surprisingly ordinary. And sometimes people couldn’t really explain their choices at all. They just liked the sticker. Which, when you think about it, is a perfectly good reason.

A sticker that started a friendship

One of the nicest stories I found came from that same Zurich project. A student named Konstantin had a laptop covered with stickers, including several from a climbing gym in Baden, Switzerland, where he worked. Another student recognised the gym’s logo because he knew the place and had helped with its renovation and promotion. So he approached Konstantin and started talking. They soon discovered that they had quite a few friends and acquaintances in common. What began with a simple question about a sticker eventually led to them spending time together outside university.

A sticker on the back of a laptop helped two people discover a connection they might otherwise never have noticed. And I can relate to that. Last summer, while walking along a beach in the south of France wearing an old Nextcloud T-shirt, I was approached several times by complete strangers who recognised the logo. Before I knew it, we were standing there in 35-degree heat, talking about Nextcloud, open source and digital autonomy. I actually wrote about it in an episode of De Overstap on Computable.nl (https://www.computable.nl/2026/08/17/de-overstap-9-nextcloud-op-het-strand/; text in Dutch).

There’s another lovely detail in Konstantin’s story (https://dlf.uzh.ch/sites/laptopstickers/konstantin/). He originally started putting stickers on his laptop because a former flatmate had designed one. He wanted to show her that he appreciated her artwork. One sticker led to another. And another. Eventually, his laptop became a collection of little stories.

Sometimes all it takes is The Office

There’s a similar, if slightly less dramatic, story from the Netherlands. Wisang, a student at the University of Twente, wrote about his laptop stickers (https://www.utwente.nl/en/stories/student/612150/what-your-laptop-stickers-say-about-you/) and how they reflect the communities he belongs to, the music he likes and the places he’s visited. He describes his laptop as a kind of time capsule.

But he also explains that stickers can be excellent conversation starters. See someone with a sticker from a band you like? There’s an obvious reason to say hello. He even recalls talking to someone whose laptop featured a sticker from The Office. That led to a conversation about how the person had failed to finish a paper because they were too busy watching the series for the fifth time.

Not exactly a life-changing encounter of course. But that’s rather the point, isn’t it? We spend so much time communicating through screens that it’s quite refreshing to discover how something stuck on the outside of a screen can encourage people to talk to each other.

Your laptop as a personal time capsule

Another interesting aspect is how these collections develop over time. Some people start with a single sticker and gradually add more. Others deliberately cover every available square centimeter. And sometimes the stickers overlap because there simply isn’t any space left. I wonder how many people could still remember where every sticker came from. Perhaps they got one at their first technology conference. Another from a friend. A third from a project they once worked on. Years later, the laptop might be technically outdated, but its cover contains a small history of its owner’s life.

That also raises an interesting question. What happens when you replace the laptop? Do you start again with a clean surface? Try to peel off the old stickers? Or keep the old laptop because you can’t quite bring yourself to throw away all those memories?

In a Hackaday article about laptops and stickers (https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/hackers-fingerprints-laptops-and-stickers/), Elliot Williams explores how unique these collections can become. He also makes an observation I particularly like: sometimes people have the same stickers because they gave them to each other. In other words, those little images can represent shared experiences and friendships. Not just individual identity, but a bit of collective history too.

There is even a museum for them

And then I discovered Stickertop.art (https://stickertop.art/). Yes, someone has created an online collection dedicated to laptop covers decorated with stickers. Which I think is a wonderful idea. After all, we preserve photographs, paintings, posters and countless other examples of personal creativity. Why not laptop lids?

A laptop covered with stickers is often a completely unique object. There might be thousands of identical ThinkPads in circulation, but probably only one with that particular combination of stickers arranged in exactly that way. And once the laptop disappears, that little collection disappears with it. Unless somebody takes a photograph.

Making something mass-produced your own

Perhaps what appeals to me most is the contrast between the way laptops are designed and the way some people choose to use them. Manufacturers spend enormous amounts of time making their products look sleek, professional and consistent. A ThinkPad is supposed to look like a ThinkPad. A MacBook is supposed to look like a MacBook. And then someone comes along with a handful of stickers and completely ignores all that carefully considered industrial design.

I find that rather charming. Especially because I like the idea of making technology your own. On Just Me, we talk a lot about personal computing, but much of the technology we use today is remarkably uniform. The same devices, the same operating systems, the same applications and increasingly the same online services. Of course, putting stickers on a laptop doesn’t change any of that technically. But it does change the relationship between the owner and the machine, at least a little. It becomes less anonymous. Less like just another product. More like something that belongs to a particular person.

And perhaps that is what stickerbombing really is. Not necessarily art, although it can be. Not necessarily a deliberate statement of identity, although it often is. And not necessarily an attempt to communicate with strangers, although apparently it sometimes works remarkably well. Maybe it’s simply a way of making an otherwise ordinary object a little more personal. One sticker at a time. And if one of those stickers happens to start a conversation, or even a friendship, that’s a rather nice bonus.

What If We’ve Been Looking at the Internet the Wrong Way?

I spend quite a lot of time thinking about technology. Linux, open source, AI, the IndieWeb, journalism, personal websites, and all sorts of little experiments that I probably spend far too many evenings working on. But lately, I’ve been wondering whether I’ve been looking at the internet from the wrong direction.

Or perhaps not the wrong direction. Just one particular direction. When I come across an interesting new technology, my first reaction is usually to wonder what I could do with it. Could I build something? Could it make journalism more interesting? Could it help people become less dependent on big technology companies? Could I run it on my own computer?

Those are perfectly reasonable questions, I think. But they’re not the only questions worth asking.

A conversation in Berlin

One of the things that got me thinking about this happened during the Nextcloud Community Conference 2026 in Berlin. I spent quite some time talking with Christian Fu Müller, Nextcloud’s AI lead. We talked about AI, agentic AI, its possibilities, and the ways people might use it. At some point, Christian showed me a book he had brought along. An actual paper book, which somehow seems worth mentioning at a technology conference.

It was How Not to Use AI, by Abi Awomosu. I hadn’t come across it before, but it caught my attention. And after reading it, I found myself thinking about AI a little differently. Not because I’d suddenly become sceptical about AI. Far from it. I’m still a big fan, perhaps even more so than before.

But the book helped me reconsider something. I tend to approach AI by asking what it can do. What tasks can it perform? What can I build with it? How can it make something easier or more interesting? Increasingly, though, I find myself wondering whether I should spend just as much time asking what people actually need from it. Is that the best possible way to use AI? And perhaps that question shouldn’t be limited to AI. Perhaps I should be asking it about the internet as a whole. In a way, the book made me realise something that had been lurking somewhere in the back of my mind for quite a while, but that I’d never really managed to put my finger on.

What are people actually doing?

A while ago, I came across stories about teenagers using shared Google Docs to communicate with each other. Not because Google Docs is a particularly good messaging platform, but because it was available to them when other forms of communication weren’t. I love that kind of thing. Someone designs a tool for one purpose, and people decide to use it for something completely different. Or consider people who spend hours together in a Discord voice channel without really talking. They’re studying, working, playing games, or just doing their own thing. They’re not necessarily there to have a conversation. They simply like knowing that someone else is around.

Why do they that? That question fascinates me. We’ve spent decades developing increasingly sophisticated ways for people to communicate online. And then some people use those technologies to enjoy being together without communicating very much at all. Or take the people who buy old iPods, even though their smartphones can play practically every song ever recorded. Why? Maybe nostalgia. Maybe they like the physical buttons. But perhaps some of them simply want to listen to music without being interrupted by messages, notifications, recommendations, or the temptation to check something else. What if the attraction of an old iPod isn’t what it can do, but what it doesn’t do?

The things people don’t necessarily ask for

Here’s what makes this particularly interesting to me. People don’t always know how to describe what they want from technology. They don’t necessarily say, “I would like a digital environment where I can experience social presence without the obligation to interact.” They just sit in a Discord channel with their friends. They don’t say, “I need a separate online identity where I can escape the pressure of presenting a carefully curated version of myself.” They create a second Instagram account that only a handful of friends know about. And they don’t necessarily say, “I would like to reduce the cognitive demands of my digital environment.” They buy an old iPod.

Of course, I’m simplifying things here. People have all sorts of reasons for doing what they do. And three interesting examples don’t automatically add up to a trend. But that’s exactly why I find this so fascinating. Because sometimes, the most interesting developments aren’t announced at technology conferences. They don’t appear in product roadmaps or industry reports. They emerge when people start doing slightly unexpected things with the technology they already have. And perhaps those little experiments tell us something about needs and desires that haven’t yet been properly understood.

Looking beyond my own little corner of the internet

There’s another reason I want to explore this. I’m a big fan of the IndieWeb. I like personal websites, RSS, open standards, and the idea that people should have more control over their digital lives.

But I also realise that this probably colours the way I look at the internet. When I see people becoming frustrated with a large social network, I’m inclined to think about independent websites or decentralised alternatives. When I read about concerns over online privacy, I immediately think about local-first software, self-hosting, and open source. And when someone complains about search engines, I start looking at alternative search tools.

But what if that’s not what those people actually want?

Perhaps someone frustrated with Instagram doesn’t want an independent website at all. Perhaps they simply want a place where they can share silly photos with five friends without worrying about everyone else. Perhaps someone concerned about privacy doesn’t want to run their own server. They just want their phone to stop asking them questions.

I think there’s a real danger in looking at people’s behaviour and immediately interpreting it through our own technological preferences. I’d like to become a little better at avoiding that.

The internet’s little understories

I’ve started thinking of these things as digital understories. The small, sometimes strange things people do online that might tell us something bigger about being human. Not necessarily trends. Certainly not predictions about the next big thing. More like little clues. Why do people talk to AI chatbots about things they hesitate to tell their friends? Why do some online communities deliberately try to remain small? Why do people create elaborate digital spaces that hardly anyone will ever visit? Why do we save thousands of photographs, only to become uncomfortable when our phones unexpectedly remind us of something from ten years ago? And why do people sometimes seem to want less technology, while spending more and more of their lives online?

I don’t know the answers. But I’d love to spend more time looking for them. And not just within the IndieWeb. In gaming communities, fandoms, online classrooms, group chats, hobby forums, and all those other corners of the internet that technology journalists don’t necessarily pay much attention to. Especially when people are doing things that don’t quite make sense at first. Those are often the most interesting things.

And then there’s Mara…

There’s another idea I’ve been playing with. Just Me is, well, just me. My own little corner of the internet, where I write about whatever catches my interest. But what if I invited a second voice into the mix?

Someone who isn’t particularly interested in Linux distributions, open-source software, or building yet another little tool with AI. Someone who’s much more interested in people. Why they behave the way they do online. What makes them feel connected. Why they invent strange little digital habits. And what all of that might tell us about the internet we’re creating together. I’ve even been thinking about giving this digital person a name.

So far, her name is Mara. Now, before anyone gets confused, Mara isn’t a real person. She is a fictional, AI-based character. A little experiment in creating a different perspective on the digital world, with real sources and facts behind the stories.

But I’m not sure I want to introduce her as a fully fledged contributor right away. Maybe she will just turn up in the comments occasionally. Perhaps I’d write something enthusiastic about a new technology, and she asks a question I hadn’t considered. Or maybe she points out that the interesting part of a story isn’t the technology at all, but what people are doing with it.

And yes, I wrote that in present tense. Because she’s already been doing exactly that. How? Well, I started by giving her a name and a personality. Once I was happy with who she is and the role she might play here at Just Me, I simply asked her: “Have a look around my blog and pick three posts you’d like to comment on, based on your personality and the role we’ve discussed. Then write those comments so I can review them.” And that’s exactly what she did. They were interesting and relevant. So I published them.

I rather like the idea of a curious fictional character slowly finding her place on Just Me. And who knows? Perhaps one day I’ll ask her to write a post of her own (spoiler: I will). Or perhaps she’ll turn out to be rather annoying. That could be interesting too. I’m simply becoming increasingly fascinated by the things people do with the internet when nobody is telling them how they’re supposed to use it. And I have a feeling there are a lot of stories hiding there. I just need to learn where to look.