Long before social media existed, before search engines were sophisticated enough to reliably surface anything, the world of the internet was quite different. If you wanted people to find something you'd made, you didn't optimize for some algorithm — there simply wasn't one worth optimizing for at the time. You relied on people, and on a simple, direct arrangement called a link exchange.

Here's how it worked: you'd reach out to another site owner and propose a fair trade. Post my link on your page, and I'll post yours on mine. It wasn't enough to just mention someone's site in passing — you wanted to genuinely drive your visitors toward them and have them do the same for you. It was reciprocal by design, built on trust between two people who'd agreed to support each other's work. That's how a lot of discovery happened across the entire early internet — not curated, not ranked, not monetized by any single company standing in the middle of it. Just people, pointing each other toward things worth finding, things they trusted, and things they thought you’d find interesting.

I remember discovering small, independent game developers exactly this way — teams working out of what amounted to a garage, posting screenshots and progress updates on modest websites, genuinely excited to talk to anyone who found them. There was no polish, no marketing department, no algorithm deciding who got to see what they were building.

Looking back, those developers were rebels in their own right, even if nobody called them that at the time. They were carving a path through a genuine wild west — no established playbook, no guaranteed audience, no corporate machine behind them. They built things because they loved making them, and they found their audience one honest connection at a time, because that was what was available. That spirit — scrappy, direct, unmediated — was the actual foundation the entire game industry grew out of.

A lot of studios that started exactly that way have grown enormously since then. Growth and success aren't inherently bad things. But some things do tend to get lost along the way. The direct line between creator and audience thins out. The rebel energy that had built the thing in the first place ended up getting replaced by a brand, a shareholder report, and a quarterly earnings call.

I don't think that shift happened because link exchanges weren’t the default anymore. I think it happened because something else replaced them — something more centralized, more profitable for a handful of companies, and less personal for everyone else. Sophisticated search engines and social media platforms didn't just make discovery easier. They moved control of that discovery into a small number of hands and turned word of mouth into something that could be bought, ranked, and monetized.

And in the years since, we've watched what unchecked corporate control of creative work can actually look like.

id Software — the studio that made DOOM, a game that shaped my entire relationship with video games — was recently gutted, losing roughly half its staff in a round of Microsoft layoffs affecting thousands across Xbox. People who spent their careers building something genuinely beloved got treated as line items to be trimmed.

Then there’s Bungie — the studio behind Halo and Destiny. Bungie has been gutted repeatedly since Sony's $3.6 billion acquisition in 2022, cutting hundreds of jobs across multiple rounds, most recently reducing headcount from around 1,300 to under half that. One round of layoffs came shortly after Destiny 2's biggest expansion in years exceeded the company's own internal projections. Despite the expansion’s success, employees began to discover they were being laid off, some via the company’s own corporate social media post before any internal communication reached them. Meanwhile, the studio's former CEO reportedly spent the acquisition years buying up classic cars while the employees who'd built the games actually generating that value lost their positions again and again.

Neither of these companies started out this way. Somewhere between a small, rebellious beginning and a massive, shareholder-driven present, something got lost — and it wasn't just money or scale. It was the basic sense that the people creating the actual value deserve to be treated like people, and that creativity is worth something beyond the transaction it can be turned into.

I don't have any illusions about matching those companies' reach with Habitat. That was never the point. What I can do is refuse their model entirely and build this the way the original rebels did — small, personal, direct. A devlog where I actually talk about what I'm making, including the mistakes and dead ends. Honest posts about the tools I use and why. And, starting now, real link exchanges — genuine reciprocal connections with other small creators, artists, and developers who care about the same things I do, rather than chasing an algorithm that was never built with either of us in mind.

Old-school and good business sense aren't actually in tension here. A community built on real trust tends to be more loyal, more genuine, and more likely to actually stick around for years, not just a launch weekend. That's the kind of community I want Habitat to have — and it starts by shrugging off the shackles of modern corporations and marketing and getting back to the actual work of making things with love.

If you're a small developer, artist, or creator who believes in the same thing — reach out. Let's exchange links, support each other's work, and be rebels together, the old-school way.