Unwind
The Wholesome Web
Animals, kindness, compliments from strangers and pages built purely to improve your afternoon. No irony anywhere on this list.
15 sites
A countdown of a thousand small good things, from the cold side of the pillow to popping bubble wrap, written daily for years.
Cut-out cats rain down and bounce off the bottom of the screen, and you can grab one and fling it at the others.
- <1 min
- Desktop
One sincere, specific compliment per click, written by people rather than generated. For days that have not gone well.
- <1 min
One button, one progress bar, and the firm assurance that everything is now OK, which beats the alternative.
- <1 min
Every adoptable animal in a hundred thousand shelters, searchable by postcode, which is dangerous browsing after 11pm.
A pug in a rug, plus a timer counting exactly how long you have now watched the pug be in the rug.
- <1 min
The internet's default supply of small animals doing small things, restocked constantly by thirty million subscribers.
- 10 min
Strangers being decent to each other, collected into one feed for the days when every other feed has been too much.
- 10 min
A library of specific, doable kindness ideas and the research on why doing them helps the doer as much as the recipient.
- 10 min
Giant pandas eating bamboo, live from Washington, on the webcam that periodically takes down the zoo's own servers.
- 10 min
Animal rescue stories with the video attached, engineered from the ground up to make you cry quietly at your desk.
- 10 min
- Sound on
A rescue that livestreams its foster kittens and feral colonies around the clock, with vets narrating in the chat.
- 10 min
A live room of service-dog puppies in training, which is the single most reliable meeting-break on the internet.
- 10 min
The account that rates every dog above ten out of ten and has defended that scale in public for over a decade.
Newborn animals from zoos and aquariums worldwide, with their names, weights and the keepers' notes attached.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
The Wholesome Web: questions
How many sites are in The Wholesome Web?
15 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 1 of them is an AltF original that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
15 of the 15 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
14 of 15 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 15 are safe for work and 14 work with the sound off.