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

  • Pope Bob@dobbs.town
    41·
    5 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.

    • speeding_slug@feddit.nl
      14·
      5 months ago

      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.

    • marx2k@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 months ago

      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?

      • mrpalmer16@lemmy.mlOP
        1·
        5 months ago

        That sounds amazing, I somehow missed it. Some of the other sites posted abovr seem to be trying to bring back the magic.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      17·
      5 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
      13·
      5 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
        10·
        5 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.

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
          4·
          5 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
            2·
            5 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.

        • marx2k@lemmy.world
          2·
          5 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

    • superkret@feddit.org
      20·
      5 months ago

      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

    • naught101@lemmy.world
      8·
      5 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
        2·
        5 months ago

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

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    15·
    5 months ago

    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
        4·
        5 months ago

        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?

        • whoareu@lemmy.ca
          2·
          5 months ago

          in gemini you typically find pages using Antenna (gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/) here you would find different blog all across gemini. also you could go to bbs(gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/) to discuss stuff of variety of range.

      • naught101@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 months ago

        Man, their website is pretty off-putting. Where’s the get-started/dive-in type page? How do I use the thing?

  • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
    11·
    5 months ago

    Stumbleupon was fun.

    I miss old web shit.

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

    • 7EP6vuI@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      5 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
        1·
        5 months ago

        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).

  • Last@reddthat.com
    8·
    5 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.