wander the web

19 Mar, 2026

TL;DR: With Wander, you can create and browse through decentralized StumbleUpon-like website viewer instances. Each instance owner defines not only websites to view on their instance, but recommended instances whose websites can be viewed on their instance too.

According to my most popular posts and recent conversations, discovery seems like a hot topic around these parts. Speaking of, Hacker News keeps bringing up related Internet projects to my attention. This time, it's Susam's Wander, as discussed in his Hacker News submission, Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web. He gave this quick explainer as a comment:

Hello HN!

This tool is inspired by Kagi Small Web (recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410542). A common concern raised here is that Kagi Small Web currently accepts only blogs, comics and YouTube channels. It does not accept arbitrary small websites. That limitation motivated me to build Wander.

Wander is fully decentralised. Anyone can host it on their own website. It consists of just two files: an index.html for the Wander console and a wander.js where you link to other websites and other Wander consoles. It is a bit like a webring, but more flexible. Each console can link to any number of sites and other consoles.

There is no server-side code, no database, nothing to install. If you have a website, you can set it up by uploading just two files. In fact, you can host it on GitHub Pages or Codeberg Pages too.

If you like the idea, please join the network. I would love to see it grow.

More details about how it works and how to set it up here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#readme

You're going to want to view the Codeberg repository to understand how it works.

For 1.5 hours of initial work, it appears to be a resounding success. As for my input on Wander, I will compare it to a similar website that I'm most familiar with, Cloudhiker. Compared to Cloudhiker at the time of writing, Wander:

• Is free and open source, self-hosted, licensed under the MIT license, and hosted on Codeberg.
• Has a barebones design by default, which can be easily customized by editing the CSS for an instance's HTML file.
• Supports easy instance customization by way of editing CSS in its HTML file, as seen in Sven's Wander instance.
• Doesn't show first-party nor third-party ads.
• Doesn't support accounts, likes, categories, and other features Cloudhiker supports.
• Doesn't have a browser extension.
• Has instance owners defining instance and website links for their instance, instead of having users submitting them to a central authority.
• Links to much fewer websites, but that makes sense as the project just launched.

Let me hand over the mic to you. What other tools that help you wander the web should more people know about and use?