Smallweb Subway
gusbus.space

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

  • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
    11·
    3 个月前

    Stumbleupon was fun.

    I miss old web shit.

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

  • Pope Bob@dobbs.town
    10·
    3 个月前

    @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.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      10·
      3 个月前

      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.

    • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
      5·
      3 个月前

      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.

      • chip@feddit.rocks
        6·
        3 个月前

        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.

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
          31·
          3 个月前

          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…

          • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            3 个月前

            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.

        • marx2k@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 个月前

          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

    • naught101@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 个月前

      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.

      • Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one
        2·
        3 个月前

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

    • 7EP6vuI@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      3 个月前

      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?

      • naught101@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 个月前

        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).

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    3 个月前

    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.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        3 个月前

        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:

        1. Recommendations are human curated
        2. Recommendations come from a single human (or well defined collective)
        3. 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.

        • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          3 个月前

          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?

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 个月前

    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?

    • Jarix@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 个月前

      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.@aussie.zone
      1·
      3 个月前

      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.