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
Stumbleupon was fun.
I miss old web shit.
Ninety zeros dot com was one of the Internet’s weirdest best things.
Kagi is also experimenting with small web
Man I wanna like Kagi but I keep reading batshit things from its founder
I’m interested in the batshit, I love weird internet lore…
Be like him, but don’t copy the batshit.
This is like the old StumbleUpon! Thanks for this!
Man what a trip, felt like I was hopping around the old web again.
@mrpalmer16 Webrings are part of the old ‘wild west’ era of the internet that I miss. Seeing them, or something close, making a comeback would be great. So would people having webpages instead of social media accounts… but I don’t see that happening.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Website hosting is still a thing. Not everything needs to be self hosted.
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.
Gonna add my voice to those calling for a foss stumbleupon
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.
Yeah I remember very clearly — they introduced advertising and the whole thing went immediately to shit 🤷
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
Finally web 3.0
/s
hexbear’s trans comm just hooked into one! super cool
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.
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.
There is also Gemini protocol!
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
then you’re visiting websites that are badly coded
like lemmy, for example.
the back button works fine for me here
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.
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
What would be really cool would be an open source, federated version of DMOZ
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).
