There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites.
Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Even if you do not particularly care for becoming the next big thing, it’s still discouraging to put work into a website and get next to no traffic beyond the usual bots.
I love the fact that federation means we could have a grandma-focused instance that applies all my hypothetical filters by default. It’s possible… but there is currently no desire to become the front page of the internet. We’re a niche, and that just means we aren’t the place to try to advertise for the little guy.
wanting to advertise for the little guy in general is kind of pointless, it feels good until you realize that in a healthy ecosystem there are just always going to be more little guys–the middle guys are selected from larger pool and the big ones are selected from larger pool of the middle guys … it’s the evolution. and evolution is all about niches and being good enough.
the kind of link lists linked in the OP are actually awesome, but they are best served in larger number and in context. especially, if eg. i see someone make an insightful post or article and turns out the same person has a list of links, then it’s usually a treasure trove of more posts, articles, insights and even projects and communities. and yes, if i gave the link list to my mom it would be completely counter-productive, regardless of whether someone is a “little guy” or not. the littleness is not the point, the relevancy is.
and sure you could make link lists that are assorted ranging topics with the main criterion “the author found it interesting and want to share it and/or come back later to it”, and while some of that cake is eaten by micro-blogging sites like mastodon or bluesky (esp. the sharing and quick discussion). outright simple, structured lists also have own kind of charm.