Let's bring back the webring.
Let's bring back the webring.
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
@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.
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.
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?
Nope. Died like Digg and a bunch of others. There's a run down here (which I only quickly skimmed): https://productmint.com/what-happened-to-stumbleupon/
@bobdobberson @mrpalmer16 omg YES stumbleupon was incredible! I've asked around if people remember this and it seems that not a ton of people were on there.
That sounds amazing, I somehow missed it. Some of the other sites posted abovr seem to be trying to bring back the magic.
@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.
Permanently Deleted
I love this idea, the back button on browsers feels like it exists because of webrings
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 🤷
Kagi is also experimenting with small web
Man I wanna like Kagi but I keep reading batshit things from its founder
Be like him, but don't copy the batshit.
I'm interested in the batshit, I love weird internet lore...
Man what a trip, felt like I was hopping around the old web again.
This is like the old StumbleUpon! Thanks for this!
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.
There is also Gemini protocol!
I'm down.
You gotta be down to know whats up.
Stumbleupon was fun.
I miss old web shit.
Ninety zeros dot com was one of the Internet's weirdest best things.
I'm in a few webrings! https://wetnoodle.org they're under the navigation menu towards the bottom
This is a great idea. I didn't see a Linux subway yet, but the process for requesting new lines seems pretty simple.
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.
This is so cool!
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).
hexbear's trans comm just hooked into one! super cool
Neocities does this right?
They do indeed
Couldn't agree more
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?
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
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.
Is the StumbleUpon thing not something Mozilla could do with Pocket?
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.
Finally web 3.0
/s