About

Explaining the Interneto Project

The name Interneto derives from “Inter-communicated Networks”, with the O representing closed circular connections.

Interneto Links is a curated web directory: categorized websites maintained in Raindrop.io and exported into Markdown-based documentation.

Project Background

Started in 2020 by David7ce to build a freely accessible, systematically organized database of websites.

Indexing the whole web is intractable — of an estimated 1–2 billion registered domains, fewer than ~200 million are actively maintained and only a small fraction provide meaningful utility (per the Netcraft Web Server Survey and Majestic Million). So Interneto uses selective curation, prioritizing functional relevance, technical/informational value, and signal over noise.

Historical Context

Earlier manual indexes — DMOZ (discontinued 2017) and its successor Curlie — relied on hierarchical taxonomy and human moderation, and struggled with scale and maintenance. Modern discovery is now dominated by search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) and AI interfaces (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), which optimize for retrieval over structure — contributing to the decline of directories.

Why Web Directories Still Matter

Curated directories still offer distinct advantages:

Low infrastructure overhead — hostable as static content
Privacy-preserving — no tracking or ad targeting
High signal density — manually filtered resources
Independence from SEO and marketing incentives
Portability — cloneable, versionable, usable locally

They function more like knowledge bases than search engines.

Core Challenge: Structure vs Discoverability

The main limitation is navigation, not data collection:

Approach	Strengths	Limitations
Hierarchical (tree)	Clear organization, predictable	Rigid, hard to explore laterally
Tag-based (graph)	Flexible, multi-dimensional	Can become inconsistent/noisy
Search-driven	Fast retrieval	Weak global structure

Interneto uses a hybrid model: hierarchical categories for baseline structure, tagging for cross-cutting relationships, and static export for performance and portability.

Implementation Approach

Collection — curated links stored in Raindrop.io
Classification — assignment of categories and tags
Export — transformation into Markdown files
Presentation — static website with navigable structure

This prioritizes simplicity, version-control compatibility, and long-term maintainability.

AlternativeTo — curated index of tools and software alternatives
FMHY — structured database of software alternatives and digital resources
Eylenburg — comprehensive software comparisons (OS, desktop environments, browsers, messaging, cloud, payments, spreadsheets, digital freedom tools)
ComparisonTables — detailed hardware device comparisons in tabular format
Kimovil — smartphone specifications and price comparison

These emphasize breadth and community contribution, while Interneto focuses more narrowly on structured classification and long-term knowledge organization.

Perspective

Interneto does not index the entire web. It treats the web as a high-entropy system where value emerges from selective filtering and structured organization.