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
Kagi is also experimenting with small web
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.
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?
Gonna add my voice to those calling for a foss stumbleupon
I’m down.
This is a great idea. I didn’t see a Linux subway yet, but the process for requesting new lines seems pretty simple.
