Back in the day the best way to find cool sites when you were on a cool site was to click next in the webring. In this age of ailing search engines and confidently incorrect AI, it is time for the webring to make a comeback.

This person has given his the code to get started: Webring

    • lemmyvoreEnglish
      17•1 year ago

      It will happen out of necessity once LLMs make search engines useless. Bookmarks and human-curated content will be the only way to find stuff.

      It’s already affecting small businesses worldwide, who aren’t being discovered anymore by searches in their local area.

    • @[email protected]English
      13•1 year ago

      So would people having webpages instead of social media accounts

      And there’s your problem… (in the voice of Jamie Hyneman, Mythbusters). To see a real return of webrings, people would need to have (make) their own pages and curate some links.

      Thinking about it, with the rise of selfhosted, it’s actually really viable, cobble together a docker stack with a WYSIWYG HTML editor somewhat oriented to the task (pretty sure something out there can be repurposed), a web server, proxy, and that’s about it (probably missing a fair bit, not my bailiwick, still, once the stack is made and solid, I’m guessing many would host, I would). Set a threshold of how many people you’re willing to host, say 50 or whatever so you’re able to check for CSAM or other legal minefields, and Bob’s your uncle, stir in some solid security to keep it isolated if you’re using it at home (or VPS) and it’s golden.

      OK, more complicated than I initially thought, and it’s way less friction to use something like faceplant, which is entirely their point. Still, I think, if given the opportunity, and functional tools, and low enough friction, many would prefer to have a hand curated presence on the web above a facebook page.

      I’ll stop, but thanks for the interesting thought seed.

      • @[email protected]
        10•1 year ago

        There has to be a cultural shift as well. It’s not the early 2000s anymore where a substantial portion of internet users could tinker around their desktop computers. I recently got fiber at home and we’re locked behind CGNAT. I could look for a solution for myself since I grew up opening ports on my router, but imagine someone who grew up with bubble-wrapped smartphones trying to navigate their way through that bs.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•1 year ago

          You’re not wrong, but here we are, talking open source and GPL licences. If you can make a game portal work, or the web in general, it’s viable, your ISP is a choke point though, agreed. Was more talking about an easy stack like the 'arrs, but for webrings, just an idea…

          • @[email protected]
            2•1 year ago

            At least now we have options like Pikapods where you can just throw a containerized server up cheap. Even people who might be overwhelmed by a VM can do that.

        • lemmyvoreEnglish
          7•1 year ago

          Website hosting is still a thing. Not everything needs to be self hosted.

        • @[email protected]
          2•1 year ago

          I also just got fiber from AT&T. I’m pretty grateful that their gateway/router can just offload all traffic to my own router and a t as just a dumb gateway. Right now I use duckdns to just public host a subsonic server for when I’m in the car or out and about but it’s been very pain free.

          I read up a little on cgnat but can you tell me what issues you face? I’m curious.

          Never mind… read up on it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

          I guess the alternative would be routing everything through a static ip providing vpn

  • masterofn001
    11•1 year ago

    Stumbleupon was fun.

    I miss old web shit.

    Ninety zeros dot com was one of the Internet’s weirdest best things.

  • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS [none/use name]English
    3•1 year ago

    I consider ActivityPub sites to be flat-out better than other website networking options. Sure, people complain about how people establish blocklists and shit and it’s not the idealized version nobody promised them that they assumed existed for some reason, but it’s like adding another dimension to these projects simply by dropping a list of linked or friendly instances into an ActivityPub site about page. Simply linking to a Mastodon you also run on your own Lemmy instance remains the simplest option over dogshit like Kbin and Mbin.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      how would you federate? it comes natural for lemmy to have each community on a seperate server, but how would you do this for a project like dmoz?

      i don’t think it would be a good idea that one server could own “art” for example, and no one else could contribute. and on the other side it would not be a good idea if everyone could add sites for “art” as then it’s just a federated wiki? you still would have to fight spam? do all entries in “art” have the same priority? or should there be some voting, or verifying from other instances maybe? but then rough instances could vote for each other?!

      how big is the spam problem on lemmy?

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        I don’t know, but it could be interesting to try. I could easily imagine topic-focussed servers that go into more depth on specific topics. Perhaps you would only federate things that are at a high level, or directly linked. Kinda like a wiki, but with each community doing it’s own decentralised curation and moderation…

        I haven’t seen any spam on Lemmy yet, and only a tiny amount on mastodon (I’m much more active there).

  • Pope Bob
    42•1 year ago

    @mrpalmer16 one of my favorite things back in the day was the old-school “StumbleUpon” which was like webrings on crack.

    Unfortunately, advertising and profit-seeking happened.

    • @[email protected]
      14•1 year ago

      Ah man, those times were great. Bored? Just push the button and you’ll see something new. No scrolling, just a new website with random interesting stuff to explore.

    • @[email protected]
      3•1 year ago

      Stumbleupon was great. I remember having a browser plug in for it. Then I stopped using it for a little while and never went back to it.

      Does it still exist?

        • @[email protected]
          1•1 year ago

          my go to was Fark. I know it still exits and maybe I’ll start using it again but man that site was great.

        • @[email protected]
          1•1 year ago

          FTA

          eBay announced that it had agreed to acquire StumbleUpon for a whopping $75 million. The acquisition ultimately went through on May 30th, 2007. One of the major reasons why the team decided to sell to eBay was that it was promised complete autonomy and independence from its mother company

          …sad trombone

      • @[email protected]OP
        1•1 year ago

        That sounds amazing, I somehow missed it. Some of the other sites posted abovr seem to be trying to bring back the magic.

    • @[email protected]
      8•1 year ago

      Yeah! StumbleUpon was cool. Something about how it tried to engender serendipity.

      Such a pity that so many other good recommendation engines died or succumbed to enshittification.

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 year ago

        Yeah I remember very clearly — they introduced advertising and the whole thing went immediately to shit 🤷

  • @[email protected]
    5•1 year ago

    I can’t believe anyone did this. It’s totally random (within pool of participants). There’s a reason it went away. Is the equivalent of “I’m feeling lucky” but with a smaller pool. I guess I’d you like random it’s fine I guess?

    • @[email protected]
      6•1 year ago

      You didn’t have a good experience with it, many of us did have some food experiences with it.

      But it made going out on the Internet interesting. Today I’m not sure if its less or more risky to view a sketchy site, is it more risky now with ransom ware, data scraypers, and such.

      Ide consider viruses to be less of a risk today, but my results probably vary

      My experience was that those webrings often worth checking out if you didnt have something specific you were looking for today.

      Its not the same at all, but theres a sense of my experience when i suddenly realize im on wikipedia and have opened 50+ tabs after I’ve finished what i was reading. Then just going through the tabs you have open

    • Dave.
      1•1 year ago

      Webrings were themed though, so if your interest was cars, or cats, or ham radio, you could get on a webring for one of those topics and cycle through them.

      And it wasn’t all random, you could move left or right on the ring , or jump randomly. So a good webring manager could group sites together as you went around the ring as well.