her.st looks less like a startup and more like somebody found a forgotten terminal in a concrete bunker and decided to host services from it. The homepage mixes ASCII art, Linux, privacy, XMPP, philosophy, hosting and an elaborate “Fortress” identity that is either dead serious, performance art, or correctly understands that the old Internet was more fun when those categories overlapped.
The site says it was founded in 2022 and has three members. Membership involves contributing to the Fortress, helping with projects or its library, and connecting through tools such as SSH and WireGuard.
Public Services Without Platform Brain
The practical side is real. her.st advertises hosting, an XMPP server and bot, radio material, ATOM feeds, public services and private services for members. It also maintains machine-generated transcript archives for Terence McKenna and Alan Watts.
The technical interests listed on the site include Linux, self-hosting, .NET, Go, Python, privacy and security. That is a pretty recognizable small-systems stack even when wrapped in language about fortresses, steel and immortal machines.
The contrast is the charm.
A corporate hosting company would spend weeks removing every trace of personality from this page. her.st appears to have spent that time adding more.
The Small Internet Still Exists
What makes the site relevant to Ancient Web is not its age. It is actually young. The interesting part is that it deliberately continues an older Web tradition: small groups running their own infrastructure, giving the site a distinct identity, publishing text directly and treating services like XMPP, SSH and feeds as normal parts of online life.
The visual design helps. There are huge blocks of monospace art, direct navigation, minimal polish and almost no attempt to resemble a modern SaaS landing page.
This is useful evidence that “old Web” does not have to mean “abandoned Web.” Some people are still building this way because they prefer ownership, interoperability and weirdness over platform conformity.
The site’s ideology will not be everybody’s cup of tea. That is also part of the point. Independent sites are interesting partly because they are not required to sand themselves down until everybody agrees they are inoffensive.
Three people can still build a strange little corner of the Internet, give it a mythology and wire it together with protocols that have been around for decades.