Introducing the OP MultiPass

We're quite excited to bring you to the newest fun thing you can do with OP. It's a powerful tool, but also totally unnecessary and super fun if you ask us.

Introducing MultiPass

This is a MultiPass.

But so is this

These each represent a human-curated collection of 600+ handmade pages on independent websites.

Let me explain.

Explore OP

Octothorpes are all about the open, human web. High quality web pages, made by people, browseable and discoverable through curiosity and community, not hidden behind algorithms and dark patterns. We want OP to provide a way of engaging with the modern web that's an alternative to broken search engines, closed platforms, and AI summaries. Most of the work we've been doing up to this point has been below the surface, on the plumbing to give independent sites this ability. But now we're not just building OP, we're building with OP and we hope some of you will too.

The first, long overdue step was to make some easy to use tools for browsing the ever-growing network of pages using OP. In the last few weeks we've added landing pages for domains, a "random site" button, and the Explore page.

Explore lets you browse the network with a powerful set of filters. You can explore by hashtag, domain, webring, or various combinations thereof. At the moment, I think this is the only place on the internet you can say "show me every page from a .com that was tagged with accessibility" and get a simple, bookmarkable url for the results that you can also subscribe to via RSS. Certainly the only way you can see these results in one place.

As with any network, the most important part is the people in it, and what they add to it. OP is just here to make it usable, and hopefully fun. We're really just bringing back the "web portal" idea, but we do think it's important that every site and page in the network asked to be here, and decided on their own labels. These results are not scraped, compiled, or interpreted. It's just a bunch of sites, made by humans, for their own reasons, and we give you tools to find them.

Ok, we get it. What's a MultiPass

Every set of results you get on the Explore page can be represented by a few simple criteria, which we store as chunk of data that we call MultiPass. So all the Explore page does is let you build a MultiPass and get back whatever matches its criteria. If you go to the "Advanced" tab at the bottom of the sidebar in Explore, you can download a raw MultiPass as a text file in JSON format.

In the future, when there are lots of OP servers with their own thriving communities of weirdos, doing things in their own weird way, you could use the same MultiPass file to find things you're into on any server. A #cats MultiPass from the main OP server works on the one for Bear Blog -- and you get different results!

But who wants to deal with JSON files? No one wants to text a friend a JSON file and say "upload this and see some cool sites I found." Wouldn't it be cooler just to text someone a GIF?

Luckily, the original spec for the GIF format came from a time when we were still figuring out how the internet should work. Back then, they thought you might want to embed a caption in an image, so wherever you used that image you'd have the same caption. So there's a chunk of every GIF file that's reserved for plain text. Right in the file. It's rarely used anymore, but here at OP we love forgotten but functional internet ideas.

Since a MultiPass is just a chunk of text, we thought let's put them in a GIF. Then, if you have the GIF, you have the MultiPass. So that's what we did.

A MultiPass can be a GIF

That GIF at the top of the page doesn't just represent a search for all the sites posted for Weird Web October 2025, it contains it. You can text or email or DM that GIF to someone, and, as long as it is not corrupted, they can drop it onto https://octothorp.es/explore and see the collection.

No one needs this gif for this to work. You can just copy the url for the search. But it's fun, and it's personal, and expressive, and I think we need more of that in that in the social web at the moment. We made MultiPass to be the opposite of an algorithmic feed of slop and engagement bait. We're hoping MultiPasses can be mixtapes of websites that people make for friends.

So if you want to make your own MultiPass, all you have to do is create a collection on Explore that you like, and click "Make MultiPass GIF." Your search will be pre-loaded, and you can use your own gif. You can download and start sharing however you would share a gif. We don't store any of this, so if you want to show one off, post it on Mastodon, Bluesky, or your own site using OP with the hashtag #OPMultiPass and it will absolutely make our day*.

Weird Web October is the best

Special thanks to the Weird Web October community. This year knocked it out of the park. Thank you for using OP. It's a delight to see all of your weird websites, so the first official MultiPass is our gift to you.

This commemorative MultiPass should have nearly every entry for Weird Web October 2025, which, at the time of writing was 636 pages. The animated image on the book is a graph visualization of the graph data of all the connections we've stored for the pages in this MultiPass, using Cosmograph. We hope you keep posting with OP throughout the year, and look forward to WWO #3 next year!

multipassmultipass

And here's a MultiPass for #OPMultiPass