CozyWeb is a small town on the internet.

CozyWeb is a small, slow social website at cozywww.com. Each resident gets a tiny pixel house to decorate, a guestbook for visitors and a mailbox for letters that take real time to arrive. There is no feed and no algorithm: you find people by visiting their houses.

Yes. CozyWeb lives at cozywww.com, so people often call it cozywww. Some call it Cozy Web, CozyTown or just the cozy town. It is all the same place.

Farida, an independent maker from Astana, Kazakhstan. She builds and runs CozyWeb on her own, and she is also the town's Mayor. There are no investors behind it.

Visit the Mayor's house

No, the furniture and the paintings are made by people. The furniture is drawn by pixel artists, the paintings are real works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the music and sounds were composed and recorded by people. CozyWeb never uses AI-generated art for its furniture, paintings, flourishes or sounds.

When I tell people about CozyWeb online, they sometimes ask me whether it's made with AI, and I want to answer clearly, in one place :)

The art: no and never. My stance here is very anti-AI in art. The furniture, the paintings, the flourishes, the music and the sounds were all made by people, and their names are in the No AI slop policy. CozyWeb runs on my personal savings, and I'm proud to spend that money on indie artists. Human art is the heart of this whole thing for me.

The code is where I do use AI, so let me tell you how.

I was a PM at a startup for the last five years, and I learned a lot there about how web apps run, how to put together a great tech stack and how to run a backend. I've also coded as a hobby ever since I first got online: fun personal websites, p5.js sketches and other little thingies, because I love the intersection of art and tech. That's how I learned HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the frameworks CozyWeb is built on.

I build CozyWeb myself. But I've never run anything this size before, and as a solo dev there's no one to even review my code. So I use AI to help me with it: to review and optimize the code, and to keep everything running smoothly.

I'd truly prefer to work with good, reliable devs. Right now CozyWeb runs out of my own pocket, and I can't afford that yet. Without these tools I'd have had to switch careers entirely, or pay a developer with money I don't have. So I'm very grateful I get to bring ideas to life that other people love too.

That doesn't make it simple for me. I share a lot of the concerns about AI, especially for artists. I feel uneasy supporting the big companies that run AI right now, and the unethical ways they train it. I think anyone using AI nowadays has somewhat conflicting feelings about it, and I do too.

But I still believe there's a way to use these tools to make useful websites independently, with no investors and no ads, and to try to offset the parts of the internet that are predatory and do harm. CozyWeb was built as a refuge from all that.

So I understand and respect you if you draw a hard line on all AI-generated content.

I hope one day CozyWeb can support a real team, artists and developers both. Until then, I want to be clear with you about how it's made.

Thank you to everyone who asked me so kindly, and for caring about this as much as I do <3

A letter travels the real distance between two countries, at about 300 kilometers an hour. A letter to a neighbor in your own country takes an hour, and one to the other side of the world takes two or three days. You choose the paper, the envelope and the stamp, and you can draw on the page.

No. Nothing is ranked and nothing is pushed at you. There are no likes, so nobody keeps score. You see what your neighbors make when you visit them, or when the Gazette prints it.

Not today. You can move in, decorate, write letters and visit neighbors without paying anything. To keep CozyWeb running for years, there will be a way to support it: a supporters tier, a one-time tip jar, or something like that. It is still being decided. Everything you have here today stays free, forever.

Yes. CozyWeb runs in the browser on phones, tablets and computers, and a phone gets the whole town, not a smaller version of it. You can add it to your home screen like an app.

Yes. Every house is open to visitors. Look through residents' houses on the Explore page, take a tour of Sam's house, or watch the film.

Explore houses

Press Move into your tiny house on cozywww.com and sign in with Google or with your email. Pick your address, like cozywww.com/yourname, and your house is ready to decorate.

Move into your tiny house

People say the cozy web for the quieter corners of the internet: small, warm places, away from feeds built to keep you scrolling. CozyWeb is one of those corners, built as a town you can walk around in.