What is the cozy web?

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.