Hey friend, welcome to Oasis Builders.
The vast majority of the internet sucks. It’s full of spam, junk content, scams, and vitriol.
But every so often, you come across a corner of the internet that is truly magical and nurturing. It feels like an oasis amidst a hostile wasteland.
This website is a crowdsourced repository of such oases. It’s where we celebrate and show gratitude to the people and companies making the digital world more delightful.
Oasis Builders was created by me, Rob Hardy, founder of Ungated Media.
What’s an oasis?
An oasis is a nurturing refuge from the hostile, impersonal, manipulative parts of the internet nobody likes. It’s a place where someone has chosen to ignore the “best practices” of internet marketing, and instead created the digital world they’ve always wanted for themselves and their like-minded homies.
In the founding essay for this site, I fleshed out the concept like this:
Oases exist across niches and subcultures, and across platforms. Some oases are personal and non-commercial, while others are businesses. A digital oasis can look and feel like anything. It can be as simple as a one-page website or social media profile, or as endlessly complex as a multi-layered, multi-player world. The unifying characteristics of oases—what binds them all together— is that they're authentic expressions of someone's humanity and creativity, and they treat internet visitors as cherished guests, rather than resources to be exploited.
If you’d like, you can read the rest of the essay here:
How the submission process works
Like I mentioned, this site is crowdsourced, meaning it’s driven by user submissions. In order to keep the quality and vibe of this site high, the submission process has two rules.
- You cannot add yourself. To end up on Oasis Builders, you must be recommended by someone else who adores your work, and wants to tell the world why.
- Submissions should be thoughtful, and come from the heart. Oasis Builders is a place to express genuine gratitude to the people making the internet better. Submissions that are personal, sincere, and thorough will always be accepted and prioritized, while anything quick and impersonal will probably not make it onto the site.
As of right now, editorial decisions are made by me, Rob Hardy. But in the future I would like it to be more decentralized and driven by the community.
So yeah, if you feel called to show gratitude for your favorite people and companies on the internet, here’s the submission form.
Thanks for dropping by.
-Rob