Indie Web
There is a community of people who want to bring back the “old web”, of independent, personal sites as an alternative to the corporate web. This includes a number of protocols and format to support linking between independent websites.
Resources
- IndieWeb
- IndieWebify.Me - a guide to getting you on the IndieWeb
tilde.club
A shared unix server, part of the tildeverse
Webmentions
This is a way to show backlinks on a website from other websites.

This requires no intermediate server, and no one to be checking over all websites to find webmention. Everything is completely peer-to-peer.
To facilitate this, there is webmention.io, which, essentially, provides webmentions hosting. You link to it as your webmention target, and it then provides you with a feed of all mentions of your site.
Webmentions from silos
Bridgy allows you to receive webmentions from Silos (twitter, reddit, facebook, etc.)