Most of things I find are very niche interests so it's not really useful for everyone to know about, but I wish it was easier to find niche communities for my interests to share these with.

https://retrogamecorps.com/ - has been amazing since I started getting into retro gaming last year.

https://mariushosting.com/docker/ - has been the site that got me into self hosting with my Synology NAS and I still use it as a resource regularly even though my docker containers are on a separate Debian server now.

https://ext.to/ - my go to torrent aggregator.

https://alexandrite.app/ - has been the best desktop frontend for Lemmy that I've found.

https://drawabox.com/ - I've been getting back to trying to improve at sketching and this is one of the best resources I've found.

https://gp2040-ce.info/ - made it possible for me to make my own custom hitbox controllers for Street Fighter.

https://github.com/joe-scotto/scottokeebs/ - Joe Scotto's resources helped me make my own macro pad and I want to make my own full keyboard next.

If you want to tie your shoes, Ian's shoelace website.

Way too much in depth on a niche topic, but that's why it's so awesome

free media heck yeah

ImgOps. Add imgops.com/ to any random image URL on the internet and get quick links to a bigger version, look it the source on SauceNAO, or search Google, Yandex, or TinEye. I always run art through ImgOps before posting here.

If you want to make a big poster by printing smaller sheets of printer paper, all the first page of Google results is sites that let you upload your image and then make you sign up for an account. So here’s https://bigspread.niy.ai/ instead

This site needs more people to know about it (and it was only one guy called Iain MacDonald maintaining it. I think one other person joined him recently).

It's called NewsMap. It's a wall of headlines that updates over time. No distractions, no images and you can choose your region and the topics you want to see. The dude revived it after the original site went down for some reason a few years ago. Pretty cool, specially for my ADHD brain.

catbox.moe for image hosting and litterbox.catbox.moe for temporary image hosting. Throw them a few bucks if you do use their service and can spare it. It's a cool little site.

https://www.puzzle-sudoku.com

I've linked the sudoku page, but if you scroll down, there are dozens of other puzzles and they're all well-implemented and free with plenty of customization options, difficulty levels, leader boards, etc. I patreoned the dev recently. He's very responsive to any bugs, and considers, for example, a puzzle with multiple solutions to be a bug. He also adds new puzzles fairly regularly.

omnicalculator.com

Seriously they have all the calculators.

https://cooljugator.com/ - website that helps with looking up word conjugation. Great for language learning, since a translation is sort of cheating and can lead you astray on meaning

https://www.timeanddate.com/ - super handy site for finding meeting times between time zones, looking up international calendars for holiday, etc

These are actually blog posts that list such things:

A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites (Updated 2026)

No Logins Required: Alternative Interfaces To YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram

Have you ever seen a letter or symbol somewhere that was not in copyable text and wondered how to even go about searching for what it is called? https://shapecatcher.com/ Just draw the symbol you see and it will find Unicode symbols close to it. Very useful.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/

lets you easily see what old websites and software looked like, often over multiple years.

Linuxdaw.org, an awesome database of VSTs (virtual instruments) and effects that natively support Linux. It's a great resource for musicians trying to escape the enshittification and spying of Windows.

https://lostmediawiki.com/Home

https://allchans.org/

https://evehibi.nekoweb.org/ringlink/info Webring Directory.

https://wikis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Wiki_Wiki

https://tournesol.app/ Free Youtube recommend service.

https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/

https://namelessrumia.heliohost.org/w/doku.php?id=start Personal Wiki familiar with CJK's otaku culture.

https://rocksky.app/ decentralized music tracking service. (AT Protocol based)

My two favorites:

BentoPDF - A privacy-focused PDF editor that works client-side

Cobalt Tools - Video downloader with a clean interface and good compression (YouTube stopped working and hasn't been updated, unfortunately, but community instances exist that may address this)

Want to know what possibility for harvesting a particular element is, from the ocean?

click on it in https://www.mbari.org/know-your-ocean/periodic-table-of-elements-in-the-ocean/

( scroll down a bit )

& see a new page open up, identifying how abundant/not it is, & the top-to-bottom-gradient of it..

Rare-earths may be sufficiently harvestable from the ocean using Metal-Organic-Frameworks, for coastal de-salination plants, or tidal-power-plants, if done at scale..

( which would break national-monopolies, wouldn't it? )

just don't bother trying to mine iridium through that method: you'll never get enough to make it worthwhile.

https://chestofbooks.com/crafts/index.html - has a bunch of stuff from old USA books and magazines. Seems that the Crafts section is the most impressive

I don't know how unknown it is but nobody has mentioned it yet so https://www.wolframalpha.com/

Mindblow: Find websites pertaining to local affairs.

There are very interesting events I go to in my local area, but we don’t often think about how much of our lives on phones are built around what’s happening 300 miles away from us.

Find a website where some interesting event or discovery might lead to you actually saying hello in person to someone.

Pointless Sites

It's a lot of really random stuff. I go through a few sites now and again instead of doom scrolling and I always seem to find at least one really interesting or fun thing.

A lot of the personal project sites and just weird stuff feels like the old internet and it makes me happy

https://apyhub.com/catalog

APIs for common software utilities that can be used by devs (or agents) to add inside applications.

Not particularly useful at all, but meets the obscur box for sure, and I didn't read the "useful" part of the title until after already typing this post.

I used to frequent this page in the early 2000s:

The Best Page In The Universe. https://maddox.xmission.com/

Specifically, he had an amazing blog post about Ben Stiller at the height of his career: https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=ben_stiller_should_star_in_every_movie%5E___%5E