Outside the grasp of social media nad the commercial web sits a broad community of people with personal websites and blogs. [...] The community has received many names:

• The Small Web contrasts this community with the “Big Web”, valuing personal ownership over scale.
• The IndieWeb also values personal ownership of websites, providing numerous technical standards and proposals to help facilitate interaction between different people’s blogs.
• Web 1.0 rejects the hype of “Web 2.0” apps, using simple, straightforward technologies to build websites.
• The Blogosphere is an old term that’s been around since 1999, referencing the community of bloggers.
• The Web Revival is the concept shared by many that this community has been growing and making a comeback.

This web relies on the hyperlinks.

There is the classic web Discovery with Blogrolls, Webrings and Feeds.

and search engines that are wonderful tools to find a specific thing, but they shouldn't be the only discovery tool, because they only show a subset of the available information.

That's why Clew highlights the small independent websites "to make discovering what real people think easier". Other search engines are doing this:

• Marginalia
• Unobtanium
• Stract
• Lieu focus on webrings.
• Mwmbl - curated by the users.
• Search My Site crawls user-submitted sites
• Wiby for websites using older technology, great for use on vintage computers.
• YaCy - a decentralized search engine
• PeARS - A search engine that can be run in the browser, without needing a server.
• Mojeek - an independent search engine

Another idea to bring back a healthier web is to provide blogrolls in the OPML format directly: https://opml.org/blogroll.opml.
Jamesg.blog created the Artemis Link Graph web extension. It lists the web pages authored by people you follow that link to the page you are viewing.

All of these has one limitation: much of the independent web today is made up of people with similar interests, in technology in particular.