Open Source @lemmy.ml mrpalmer16 @lemmy.ml 12mo ago

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

Opensource @programming.dev Mac @programming.dev 12mo ago

gusbus.space /smallweb-subway

58 comments

@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.
  
  Old StumbleUpon was everything to me
  
  Oh god, I had it set as my home page for the longest time. I never got anything done but it was great having something new every time we opened our browser.
- @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.
- 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/
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
  
  Just block JavaScript
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

https://kagi.com/smallweb/
- 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.
- https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
- 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.
- There is also Gemini protocol!
  
  I'm aware of it (and while not being super enthused about it, I can my personal interest growing over time as the internet keeps tracking the way it is).
  
  But how does it help with a page recommendation system? Is there a strong culture of that sort of thing on Gemini?
  
  Man, their website is pretty off-putting. Where's the get-started/dive-in type page? How do I use the thing?
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
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).
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.
Neocities does this right?
- They do indeed
hexbear's trans comm just hooked into one! super cool
Couldn't agree more
Is the StumbleUpon thing not something Mozilla could do with Pocket?

58 comments