Worth Wandering: Ytoo!

A one-person web portal that remembers one of the most important jobs a website can have: sending you somewhere else.

The modern web is very good at keeping you where you are.

Open a social network and it would rather you never leave. Search engines increasingly try to answer the question before you visit the source. Platforms build feeds designed to make the next thing another thing inside the same platform.

Ytoo! does almost exactly the opposite.

It wants you to leave.

That is the first thing I like about it.

Ytoo! is an old-school web portal built by VegBao, who launched it in March 2024 as a one-person hobby project. VegBao describes growing up with portal sites, later discovering Neocities in 2020, and realizing that people were still making actual personal homepages. An earlier Taiwanese portal project, Vegbao.com, followed. Ytoo! came later as an English-language version of that basic idea: a portal built around the kind of web VegBao actually wanted to visit.

There are no ads, trackers, or fees. There is also no attempt to hide what inspired it.

It looks like a portal.

And I mean that as a compliment.

A website full of doors

Ytoo!'s homepage asks a wonderfully simple question:

“What do you wanna do today?”

Then it gives you places to go.

Not three featured articles followed by a newsletter signup. Not an algorithmically generated feed.

Links.

Lots of links.

There are sections for social sites, creative tools, journals, video, music, forums, virtual pets, online games, old messaging systems, web tools, strange sites, and the sort of things that comfortably fit under a heading like Fun Time.

You can go from Bear Blog to Dreamwidth, from SomaFM to Radiooooo, from MelonLand to old software repositories, from virtual pets to revived versions of online games, and then wander into places like The Old Net, Web Design Museum, or Mr. Doob.

It is dense in a way modern web design has mostly trained us to avoid.

That density is part of what makes it good.

There is an assumption baked into Ytoo! that you are capable of looking around, noticing something interesting, and clicking on it. The page doesn't need to predict what will maximize your engagement. It doesn't need to manufacture an endless stream for you.

It gives you a map and lets you wander.

Nostalgia, with some selective editing

Ytoo! could easily have been a nostalgia exercise.

There is plenty of Y2K web language here. The 88×31 button is alive and well. There is a guestbook. There are portal categories. There are little graphics and advertisements.

Except the advertisements aren't advertisements.

Ytoo! has more than 20 fake ads that appear randomly. VegBao wanted the visual character of old portals without putting real advertising on the site, so the ads are deliberately fake.

That is such a small decision, but it gets at what Ytoo! does particularly well.

It isn't trying to preserve every part of the old web indiscriminately. It is borrowing some of the good ideas—the personality, density, linking, exploration, and sense that somebody actually assembled the place—without deciding we also need pop-ups, surveillance, and a mortgage refinance banner blinking at us.

There is a distinction between making a site look old and understanding what was useful about the older web.

Ytoo! understands the distinction.

There is a person here

The more interesting parts start showing up once you get away from the homepage.

Visitors can recommend sites for inclusion. Those suggestions are read by hand, assigned to sections, and—unusually—the recent submissions themselves are public. You can see people recommending projects, explaining what they are, and arguing for why they belong.

That turns what could have been VegBao's bookmarks into something more communal without turning it into another automated directory.

There is still somebody making decisions.

The guidelines favor noncommercial, maintained, friendly sites with some connection to the retro or independent-web spirit. The submission page explicitly says every recommendation is read manually.

The Newsroom shows the same thing happening in practice. When Ytoo! returned with a large update in June, links suggested by visitors were added across multiple sections, a discontinued Skype revival was replaced, and the new personal-site Link Directory and recommendation system were launched.

That maintenance matters.

A link directory that nobody maintains eventually becomes an archaeological site.

Ytoo! still feels inhabited.

The guestbook might be the best proof

There are currently more than 120 entries in Ytoo!'s guestbook. More interesting than the number is what people are saying.

Several visitors say they made Ytoo! their browser homepage. One says it has made web surfing fun again. Another talks about discovering spaces they hadn't known about before.

That may be the most convincing argument for the site.

A portal only works if people actually use it as a portal.

Ytoo! appears to be doing that.

And there is something refreshingly mundane about a guestbook in 2026. You visit somebody's website. You leave them a message. Somebody else comes along later and leaves another.

No follower count required.

The button wall is exactly what it should be

Ytoo! recently added a separate Link Directory for personal websites with 88×31 buttons.

It currently has only a small collection of sites, so it is still a young part of Ytoo!, but I like the distinction. The main portal collects useful and interesting destinations across the web, while the button wall is specifically for homepages, blogs, art sites, and hobby pages made by fellow web surfers.

I hope that part gets enormous.

Not because every website needs another directory listing, but because 88×31 buttons do something URLs alone don't. They let people leave a little piece of their site's identity somewhere else.

A web made of connections between independently owned sites is much more interesting than 500 isolated islands.

What Ytoo! gets right

Ytoo! has a clear idea of what it is.

That sounds trivial.

It isn't.

It isn't trying to become the new Google. It isn't trying to federate every website, invent a protocol, add an AI assistant, build an account system around browsing, or turn discovery into a startup.

It is a portal.

Someone finds interesting things, organizes them, accepts recommendations from other people, maintains the links, and gives you somewhere to start.

That restraint is one of its strengths.

It also gets human curation right. Recommendations can come from the community, but inclusion isn't simply an open database dump.

Somebody is still tending the garden.

And perhaps most importantly, Ytoo! is generous with attention.

Nearly everything interesting about the homepage leads somewhere other than Ytoo!.

Think about how strange that has become.

Most commercial products measure success partly by how long they can keep you inside them. Ytoo! becomes useful precisely when you click a link and disappear.

I like that model of the web considerably more.

What I would improve

The biggest strength of Ytoo! is also where I think it has room to get better.

There is a lot here.

Once the portal grows large enough, discovery inside the directory itself can become difficult. I wouldn't solve that by cleaning it up into a sterile modern card grid. That would remove part of what makes Ytoo! Ytoo!.

But I would like a little more help navigating the chaos.

An optional section index, better ways to jump around the homepage, or lightweight filtering could make the growing collection easier to explore without turning the portal into a search-results page.

I would also lean harder into link health.

This is not a hypothetical problem. Ytoo!'s own update history shows discontinued services being replaced, while its public suggestions include visitors reporting that domains have changed and asking for old links to be corrected.

That's the tax every serious link collection eventually pays.

A subtle “last checked” system, a way to report a dead link, or some automated validation behind the scenes would help the collection age well. None of that needs to be visible enough to disturb the retro presentation.

I'd also like a little more optional context around some links.

Part of the fun is clicking a name because it sounds interesting, so I would not plaster descriptions everywhere. But a title attribute, expandable detail, or other progressive enhancement could tell curious visitors why a particular site made the cut.

Finally, I want to see that personal-site button wall grow.

What exists now is a beginning, not a criticism. Ytoo! has already built the mechanism for people to connect their own sites to it.

The interesting question is what that wall looks like after a few hundred people have done it.

One of the best parts of the indie web

I have been spending a lot of time lately looking at independent websites.

Some are technically impressive. Some contain decades of writing. Some are art projects. Some are experiments. Some look like they escaped from a computer lab in 1998 and have no intention of apologizing for it.

Ytoo! matters for a different reason.

It connects them.

That is easy to overlook when talking about the independent web.

Owning your site is important, but an independent web cannot just be millions of people publishing independently. There also have to be paths between those places.

Search can provide one kind of path.

Social links provide another.

Webrings, blogrolls, directories, buttons, and portals provide something different:

human-selected paths.

Ytoo! is building those paths.

It borrows the language of an earlier web without becoming a museum exhibit. It is actively maintained. Visitors contribute discoveries. People sign the guestbook. Personal sites exchange buttons.

And the homepage keeps doing the deceptively simple job that portals were built to do.

It sends you somewhere interesting.

For a one-person hobby site, that is an impressive amount of web.

And it is exactly the sort of place I built Wander to find.

Worth wandering because: Ytoo! remembers that sometimes the best thing one website can do is introduce you to another one.

Visit Ytoo!