The CozyWeb blog

Pictures and decals on the walls

2026-11-13T00:00:00Z

A wall in CozyWeb can hold a real painting, and a decal sticks to almost anything. Here is how you put both in your house, in under a minute. Every step in the video is the real app.

Hang an empty frame on a wall

Open Decorate in your house, then Art in the catalog. The frames are there, and each one comes empty. Drag a frame onto a wall and let go. The video hangs a wood frame in the middle of the left wall.

Click it, then choose a painting

Click the frame and its menu opens right beside it. Press Painting, and Choose a painting opens. The works come from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. They sit on shelves, such as Iconic, Asian Art and European Paintings, and you can search by title or by artist.

Press a work, then press Hang it. The video picks Under the Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai, the one that everybody calls The Great Wave.

A decal lies flat on a wall

The decals are under Decor in the catalog. A decal is a picture that lies flat on whatever you put it on. Drag one onto a wall, and it sits on the wall like paint. The video puts Scribbles and Bubble Tag next to the painting.

And on the floor too

A decal lies on the floor in the same way, and in the yard, on the fence or on a piece. The video drops Orange Tag on the floor between the sofa and the table. Then press Done.

Press the painting to see it large

Now press the painting in your house. A card opens with the whole work, its title, its artist and its date, and a link to the original at the Met. Neighbors who drop by can press it too. Your house lives at its own address, cozywww.com/your-name.

Moods: more looks for one house

2026-11-11T00:00:00Z

Watch the video on YouTube

One house in CozyWeb can keep more than one look. Each look is a mood, with its own pieces, its own paint and its own yard. Here is how you make a second one, in under a minute. Every step in the video is the real app.

Copy your house into a new mood

Your moods sit in tabs at the top left of your house. The pen next to the tabs opens House moods, with a card for each mood. Press Duplicate on the card of your house, and a copy of it comes in under Drafts. The video copies Home.

Give it a name and an icon

The pencil on the card opens Edit house mood. Search for an icon and pick one, type a name, then press Save. The video names the copy Winter and gives it a snowflake.

Change it, and the first mood stays as it was

Open Decorate and change the copy as much as you like. The video paints snow over the lawn around the pond, puts a red rug on the floor and sets two candles on the table in the yard. Home stays just as it was.

Publish it, and it gets its own tab

A new mood is a draft, and only you can see it. Open House moods again and press the eye on its card. Now the mood is published, and it gets its own tab next to the first one.

Switch with the tabs

Press a tab, and the whole house changes: the pieces, the paint and the yard. Visitors can switch between your published moods too, and your house opens for them in your default mood. Your house lives at its own address, cozywww.com/your-name.

Slow social media: a town with no feed

2026-11-11T00:00:00Z

Slow social media is social media that takes its time. It has no endless feed, no algorithm that picks what you see and no numbers to chase. You see what the people you know made, and then it ends.

CozyWeb is a small, slow social website, built as a town. You live in a tiny house on the internet, and a letter to a friend can take days.

The idea is older than it looks. In 2010, three authors in Germany, Benedikt Köhler, Sabria David and Jörg Blumtritt, published The Slow Media Manifesto. Point 7 says "Slow Media are Social Media". Point 9 says slow media spread by recommendation, not by advertising.

In September 2025, Herman, who makes the blog platform Bear, wrote a post called Slow social media. He listed what a slow network would have:

Friends, not followers. Both people have to agree.
A limit of about 300 friends.
A feed in the order of time, with a natural end.
Pages, not an endless scroll.
No recommendations, no ads and no short videos.

So slow social media is not one app. It is a set of choices. Something ends. You pick the people. And nobody earns money from your attention.

Almost. "Anti social media" is the wider name.

People use it for any social app that is built against the habits of the big networks. In March 2026, the newsletter Fitt Insider wrote about a wave of them in Anti-Social Media Apps Arrive, and described them as "Intentionally nonaddictive, new social platforms".

Slow social media is one kind of anti social media. It does not only take the ads out. It changes the speed.

Because the fast kind stopped being about friends.

Herman's post says it plainly. The big networks turned into "advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged".

Three essays sit on the shelf in my About notice, because they shaped the town: "Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui?" by Kyle Chayka, "Too Big to Care: Enshittification Is a Choice" by Cory Doctorow, and "Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things" by Catherynne M. Valente. All three are about what went wrong with the big platforms.

CozyWeb went one step past a slower feed. It has no feed at all. It has houses.

Letters take real time. A letter travels the real distance between you and your friend, at about 300 kilometers an hour. Inside one country it arrives in an hour. To the other side of the world it takes two or three days.
There are no likes, so nobody keeps score. A visitor signs your guestbook with words.
Nothing is ranked, and nothing is pushed at you.
The town paper, the Gazette, prints an edition when you open it. You read it, and it ends.
There are no ads, and no investors to please.

Why a tiny house on the internet?

Because a house is not a profile.

A profile is a page that feeds a feed. A house is a place. You decorate it, you fill the yard, and you pin notes to your things. Then a neighbor walks in, looks around and signs the guestbook.

You do not scroll past a house. You visit it. That is the whole trick, and it is why a tiny house on the internet feels slower than any timeline.

Every house has its own address, like cozywww.com/farida. You can explore the houses without an account.

Yes. Nothing in the town is sorted by a machine.

You find people on the town map, or by what they love, from books to tabletop games. You see what your neighbors make when you visit them, or when the Gazette prints it.

It is not for news, and it is not for a big audience.

If you want to know what happened an hour ago, a slow place is the wrong place. If you want a crowd for every post, the town is not built to give you one.

It is for the other thing: a few people, a letter that is worth the wait, and a place that is still there tomorrow.

Where do I start?

Read what the cozy web is, the idea next door. Take the tour of Sam's house. Or read About CozyWeb for the whole story.

I'm Farida. I build the town on my own, and I'm its Mayor. Come be my neighbor.

Your portrait

2026-11-11T00:00:00Z

Watch the video on YouTube

Every resident of CozyWeb has a pixel face, and it sits next to their house. Here is how you make yours, in under a minute. Every step in the video is the real app.

Open your card, then Create portrait

Your card is at the top right of your house, with your name on it. Open it and press Create portrait under the face. Until you make your own, the card shows a stand-in face. The builder opens on a face to start from, and Shuffle gives you a new one at any time.

Pick a hair, eyes and a mouth

The tabs come in four groups: The face, Makeup, Costume and Everything else. Press a tab and pick a part from its grid. The video picks a long hair, warm brown eyes and a big smile.

Give each part its own color

Under the parts, each tab has its colors: a row of swatches, a color wheel, or a color code of your own. The video makes the hair copper and the shirt blue. Then it picks a zigzag background and makes it teal.

Pick a frame, then save it

The frames go around the face, from Bare to Flourish. The video tries Stamp, then keeps Royal. Press Save portrait, and the builder closes.

Your face sits next to your house

Now your card shows your new face, and neighbors who drop by see it next to your house. The builder also keeps a face for the night theme, and Download portrait gives you a picture of your face to keep. Press Change portrait whenever you want a new look. Your house lives at its own address, cozywww.com/your-name.

The yard

2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Watch the video on YouTube

Every house in CozyWeb has a yard around it, inside its fence. Here is how you fill it, in under a minute. Every step in the video is the real app.

A table from the house stands in the yard too

Open Decorate in your house. Anything that stands on the floor can stand in the yard: drag it from the catalog past the edge of your house and let go on the grass. The video puts a Kitchen Table out on the lawn, then two Wooden Chairs.

Click a piece to open its menu. The video uses Flip on the table, so it runs along the fence, and Turn on one chair.

Grass, flowers and rocks

Decor has a Nature group with Plants, Flowers and Rocks. The plants include tufts of grass like Wheat, Clover and Sedge, and they look right at home outside. The video adds Wheat, a Sunflower and a rock.

The brush paints the grass

The Paint tab works in the yard too. The brush that paints your floor paints the grass, so you can lay a path, a sandbox or a pond. The video searches for Water and paints a small pond next to the wheat.

Pick a fence

The last shelf in Paint is Fence. Rail, Picket, Stone, Hedge and Iron each go all the way around your yard, and None takes the fence away. The video tries a few and stays on the Hedge.

Press Done

Press Done, and your yard is ready for visitors. Neighbors who drop by see it all, right up to your mailbox at the gate. Your house lives at its own address, cozywww.com/your-name.

What is the cozy web?

2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

The cozy web is the small, quiet side of the internet: group chats, newsletters, private servers and little communities, where people talk with no feed, no ranking and no crowd of strangers. The writer Venkatesh Rao gave it the name in 2019.

CozyWeb, written as one word, is also a small town on the internet at cozywww.com. This page explains both.

Where does the name "cozy web" come from?

In May 2019, Venkatesh Rao published an essay called The Extended Internet Universe. In it he wrote about "the creeping, unheralded growth of what I call the cozyweb". He spelled it as one word.

He meant the places where people really talk now: Slack groups, messaging apps, private groups and email. Things travel there because people copy and paste them to each other, not because a feed picked them.

The same month, Yancey Strickler, a founder of Kickstarter, wrote The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. His picture of the public internet is a forest at night. It is quiet, because "night is when the predators come out". So people move to newsletters, podcasts and group chats, where they know who else is in the room.

Later, the designer Maggie Appleton put the two ideas side by side in The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web. Her line is the one most people quote now. The cozy web is "the private, gatekeeper-bounded spaces of the internet we have all retreated to over the last few years".

What counts as the cozy web?

The three essays name places like these:

A group chat with your friends.
A Discord server or a Slack for people who love the same thing.
A newsletter, and the replies that come back to it.
A message board that you need an invitation for.

They have three things in common. Nobody ranks what you say. Nobody turns it into a game. And you know who is listening.

Why do people move to the cozy web?

Because the big networks got tiring. Every post there is a small show for strangers, and a machine decides who sees it.

I felt the same thing. I wanted a refuge from attention-hijacking algorithms, and from the growth tricks that made the rest of the internet exhausting. In a small place you can just talk. That wish has a name of its own: slow social media.

Is the cozy web the same as the small web?

Not quite, but they are neighbors.

The cozy web is private rooms. You need an invitation, and nobody can see in from outside.

The small web, or the indie web, is public. It is personal websites that people make by hand and run on their own.

Both live away from the feed. One has a closed door, and the other has an open one.

What is CozyWeb, the town?

CozyWeb is a small town on the internet. Every resident gets a tiny pixel house to decorate, with a yard around it. Neighbors drop by, read the notes you pinned up and sign your guestbook.

Letters travel the real distance between you, at about 300 kilometers an hour. A letter to a neighbor in your own country arrives in an hour. A letter to the other side of the world takes two or three days.

There are no likes, no feed and no algorithm. Just houses, letters and neighbors.

I'm Farida. I build the town on my own, from Astana, Kazakhstan, and I'm also its Mayor. The whole story is on the About CozyWeb page.

How is CozyWeb different from the cozy web?

In one way: the doors are open.

The cozy web of the essays is closed rooms. In CozyWeb, every house is open to visitors. Each one has its own address, like cozywww.com/farida, and anyone can walk in and look around. You can explore the houses before you move in.

What the town keeps from the idea is the size and the pace. Nothing is ranked. Nobody keeps score. A letter takes its time, and it stays between you and the friend you wrote to.

So it is cozy the way a small town is cozy, not the way a locked room is.

Is it cozyweb, cozy web or CozyWeb?

All three are out there:

cozyweb, one word in small letters, is how Venkatesh Rao wrote the idea.
cozy web, two words, is how most people write the idea now. In British spelling it is the cosy web.
CozyWeb, with two capital letters, is the town at cozywww.com. Some people call it cozywww or CozyTown.

Come see a house

The quickest way to get it is to visit one. Take the tour of Sam's house, or see how you decorate your house in under a minute.

And if you like it here, come be my neighbor.

Paint your walls and floors

2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Watch the video on YouTube

Every wall and floor of your house in CozyWeb takes a texture. Here is how you paint them, in under a minute. Every step in the video is the real app.

Pick a texture in Paint

Open Decorate in your house and go to the Paint tab. The textures sit on shelves: Wood, Tile, Brick, Stone, Walls, Fabric and more. Pick one, and it is on your brush.

Know what you want? Type it in the search box at the top. The video finds Blue Argyle that way.

Brush it on the walls

Press and drag across a wall. Every cell you pass over takes the texture. The video paints the left wall in Cream Paint, row by row, then the right wall in Blue Argyle.

The same brush paints the floor

Pick another texture, like Hickory Planks from the Wood shelf, and drag it across the floor. One stroke can cover the whole thing.

And out into the yard

The brush does not stop at the edge of your house. Keep dragging and it goes right out into the yard, so a cobblestone path can lead up to your house.

Pick a tile and the Eraser

Pick a tile takes a texture you already used. Click any cell, and its texture is back on your brush. The video takes the planks from the floor to fix the stones that landed inside the house.

The Eraser takes a texture off. Click a cell, or drag across a few. And if a stroke goes wrong, Undo is right there on the left.

Press Done

Press Done, and your house is ready for visitors. Neighbors who drop by see the new look. Your house lives at its own address, cozywww.com/your-name.

Decorate your house

2026-11-07T00:00:00Z

Watch the video on YouTube

In CozyWeb, you live in a tiny house on the internet. Here is how you decorate it, in under a minute. Every step in the video is the real app.

Pick a piece from the catalog

Open Decorate in your house. The catalog holds sofas, lamps, plants, windows and all the little things. The furniture is drawn by pixel artists.

Find a piece you like and drag it into your house.

Put it anywhere

Nothing snaps to a grid. A piece lands right where you let go of it: on the floor, on a wall, or out in the yard.

Changed your mind? Drag it somewhere else.

Change its size and color

Click a piece and its menu opens right beside it. Make it a little bigger or smaller, turn it around, and pick a new color on the color wheel.

The sofa in the video goes from 100% to 115%, then turns rose.

Add as many as you like

Keep going. A TV on the wall, a desk by the window, a table with pie and tea out in the yard.

Press Done

Press Done, and your house is ready for visitors. It lives at its own address, cozywww.com/your-name. Neighbors drop by, look around and sign your guestbook.

The CozyWeb blog

Pictures and decals on the walls

Hang an empty frame on a wall

Click it, then choose a painting

A decal lies flat on a wall

And on the floor too

Press the painting to see it large

Moods: more looks for one house

Copy your house into a new mood

Give it a name and an icon

Change it, and the first mood stays as it was

Publish it, and it gets its own tab

Switch with the tabs

Slow social media: a town with no feed

What is slow social media?

Is slow social media the same as anti social media?

Why do people want slow social media?

How does CozyWeb do slow social media?

Why a tiny house on the internet?

Is CozyWeb social media with no algorithm?

Who is slow social media not for?

Where do I start?

Your portrait

Open your card, then Create portrait

Pick a hair, eyes and a mouth

Give each part its own color

Pick a frame, then save it

Your face sits next to your house

The yard

A table from the house stands in the yard too

Grass, flowers and rocks

The brush paints the grass

Pick a fence

Press Done

What is the cozy web?

Where does the name "cozy web" come from?

What counts as the cozy web?

Why do people move to the cozy web?

Is the cozy web the same as the small web?

What is CozyWeb, the town?

How is CozyWeb different from the cozy web?

Is it cozyweb, cozy web or CozyWeb?

Come see a house

Paint your walls and floors

Pick a texture in Paint

Brush it on the walls

The same brush paints the floor

And out into the yard

Pick a tile and the Eraser

Press Done

Decorate your house

Pick a piece from the catalog

Put it anywhere

Change its size and color

Add as many as you like

Press Done