Before the world became addicted to ‘likes’ and compulsively checking incessant notifications, the internet was a vast ocean of interesting websites, strange net art projects, and data experiments. It still is, in fact! Maybe we’re just too glued to social media to notice. Thankfully, not everyone has forgotten what a special place the internet can be. @lucyhughes_PR recently created a Twitter thread of ‘underrated’ websites that deserve appreciation. Delighted by the recommendations, many others pitched in with some of their favorites. The thread includes links to immersive sites where you can look at the view through a stranger’s window, or virtually drive and listen to the radio in difference cities around the world, or zoom through the universe organized by scale. Many of the sites do some fascinating things with data, like aggregating all the free airport wifi passwords using Google Maps, or visualizing statistics on global internet usage.

We’ve put a list together of all the most entertaining and educational websites from the thread. Be sure to click on the links below each site preview if you want to check them out. Just be careful, you might get distracted for several hours.