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

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    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
      0·
      2 months ago

      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

  • Pope Bob@dobbs.town
    0·
    2 months ago

    @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.

  • Peter Amthor@dice.camp
    0·
    2 months ago

    @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.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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
      0·
      2 months ago

      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
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • marx2k@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 months ago

          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

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          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
            0·
            2 months ago

            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.

  • Last@reddthat.com
    0·
    2 months ago

    This is a great idea. I didn’t see a Linux subway yet, but the process for requesting new lines seems pretty simple.

  • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • 7EP6vuI@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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
      0·
      2 months ago

      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
        0·
        2 months ago

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