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

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
    ·
    4 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.ml
        ·
        4 months ago

        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.org
          ·
          4 months ago

          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?

          • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
            ·
            4 months ago

            It was never broke, why fix it?

            Totally fair! I don't claim to know what I'm talking about! I'm just riffing on what I suspect would work for me, but also motivated by what I feel is a relatively urgent need to create some robust and diverse human curation of the internet. So in a way I'm not really interested in remaking web rings, but more coming from the perspective of what else can be done with the same general idea along side webrings.