- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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
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The idea comes up again and again on the fediverse. It feels ripe for some app/platform to kinda nail it.
I’m not sure this is it or even something that does exactly the old web ring thing. I think a simple enough system for the human curation of web pages in a standardised way that can easily be consumed and aggregated would go a long way though. The fediverse feels like its close to something.
What about https://webri.ng ?
That seems interesting!
In the end, I’m wondering if all the pieces are here on something like the fediverse but just need to be connected. I haven’t thought about this at all until now (so I’m just riffing here) … but the essence of such a system seems to me:
- Recommendations are human curated
- Recommendations come from a single human (or well defined collective)
- Reccommendations are organised in a navigable structure
Point 3 seems to be the unclear part. A “ring” is obviously a bunch of connections (not unlike a linked list). But other structures probably have a lot to provide here, especially if they’re amenable to some basic search facility.
Aside from 3 you are essentially creating Stumble Upon.
Sorry … I don’t know what that is
You might be overthinking it, or I might be underthinking it.
When I hear “webring” I think of a simple list of sites, curated by the ring creator. And all members have a badge on their site, complete with a few nav buttons.
It was never broke, why fix it?
It was never broke, why fix it?
Totally fair! I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about! I’m just riffing on what I suspect would work for me, but also motivated by what I feel is a relatively urgent need to create some robust and diverse human curation of the internet. So in a way I’m not really interested in remaking web rings, but more coming from the perspective of what else can be done with the same general idea along side webrings.
other structures probably have a lot to provide here, especially if they’re amenable to some basic search facility
I got real excited about the webring returning. This… not so much. Keep it simple.
I mean, the search doesn’t have to be centralised at all … basic search facilities could include the text search in the browser for any page, but made more user friendly and just for the webring you’re navigating or something.
So, classic webring navigation consists of arrows to the next and previous ring instances, as well as a link to the ring index. By their nature, webrings are manageable-sized communities by nature. I don’t see how that can be improved upon by a search function?
well the central site of the web ring could be searched for any particular page that’s part of the ring, and that search could be surfaced on any page that’s part of the ring.
The full set of pages could be decentralised and cached across all members for robustness, and even include each page’s own description and recommendations for every other page if they like.
And then, of course … rings of webrings with as many levels of aggregation as people are interested in maintaining, again with decentralised caches of pages, their links and descriptions (all human curated of course) that can all be searched whenever a member page or aggregating page opts into it.
Tech capabilities have advanced since the 90s enough now that basic text search in a web page over a small data set is not hard or too much to ask.
And nested rings of rings of rings are scalable because at each level the data will just be links (and descriptions or names if available) while it would be on the user to navigate the various layers however they wish until they find something they’re interested in.
Oh, man!! This looks so much like one of my old blogs!!! The layout, the colors! Brings back great memories.
There is also Gemini protocol!
Man, their website is pretty off-putting. Where’s the get-started/dive-in type page? How do I use the thing?
Iirc it’s Geminispace.info
I could be wrong since I only visit their Gemini capsule.
I’m aware of it (and while not being super enthused about it, I can my personal interest growing over time as the internet keeps tracking the way it is).
But how does it help with a page recommendation system? Is there a strong culture of that sort of thing on Gemini?
in gemini you typically find pages using Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/) here you would find different blog all across gemini. also you could go to bbs(gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) to discuss stuff of variety of range.
What would be really cool would be an open source, federated version of DMOZ
Yes, please!
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?
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).
Couldn’t agree more
I’m down.
You gotta be down to know whats up.
hexbear’s trans comm just hooked into one! super cool
I’m in a few webrings! https://wetnoodle.org they’re under the navigation menu towards the bottom
Neocities does this right?
They do indeed
Maia Arson Crimew, one of my favorite hackers, is in a webring https://maia.crimew.gay
Oh man that site looks just like the internet before it started to suck.
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I love this idea, the back button on browsers feels like it exists because of webrings
It exists because web browsers used to not have tabs. Nowadays it’s useless cause with modern scripted web pages you never properly get back to the site you left
Just block JavaScript
Then the entire browser becomes useless. I couldn’t even post this comment without JavaScript.
Edit: I wish a search engine that only showed websites without JavaScript existed.
I wish also that THAT search engine also made it so turning on results that have paywalls is a thing you can only have turned on if YOU turn it on
Not useless. I don’t use JS. Yeah. Maybe 1/10 websites you have to skip.
How do you even post here without JavaScript?
I use an app, but Im sure one of the front ends doesn’t require JS
Duckduckgo has a no javascript mode.
Umatrix is great, you can configure it to automatically allow first party javascript, and if sites still dont work eneable bits until they do them lock those settings so the same bits will be enabled next time you’re on that site.
You can do that with NoScript too. Is the Umatrix UI any better, or are there other benefits?
noscript is like a screwdriver. umatrix is the whole toolbox.
both have their place
then you’re visiting websites that are badly coded
like lemmy, for example.
the back button works fine for me here
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?
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.
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
This is a great idea. I didn’t see a Linux subway yet, but the process for requesting new lines seems pretty simple.
Is the StumbleUpon thing not something Mozilla could do with Pocket?
Stumbleupon was fun.
I miss old web shit.
Ninety zeros dot com was one of the Internet’s weirdest best things.
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.
