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Let's bring back the webring. (gusbus.space)

submitted 5 months ago by mrpalmer16@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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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

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[-] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

What about https://webri.ng ?

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 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:

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.

[-] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 5 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@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 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.

[-] Adalast@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

Aside from 3 you are essentially creating Stumble Upon.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago

Sorry ... I don't know what that is

[-] halm@leminal.space 2 points 5 months ago

other structures probably have a lot to provide here, especially if they’re amenable to some basic search facility

I got real excited about the webring returning. This... not so much. Keep it simple.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 months ago

I mean, the search doesn't have to be centralised at all ... basic search facilities could include the text search in the browser for any page, but made more user friendly and just for the webring you're navigating or something.

[-] halm@leminal.space 2 points 5 months ago

So, classic webring navigation consists of arrows to the next and previous ring instances, as well as a link to the ring index. By their nature, webrings are manageable-sized communities by nature. I don't see how that can be improved upon by a search function?

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago

well the central site of the web ring could be searched for any particular page that's part of the ring, and that search could be surfaced on any page that's part of the ring.

The full set of pages could be decentralised and cached across all members for robustness, and even include each page's own description and recommendations for every other page if they like.

And then, of course ... rings of webrings with as many levels of aggregation as people are interested in maintaining, again with decentralised caches of pages, their links and descriptions (all human curated of course) that can all be searched whenever a member page or aggregating page opts into it.

Tech capabilities have advanced since the 90s enough now that basic text search in a web page over a small data set is not hard or too much to ask.

And nested rings of rings of rings are scalable because at each level the data will just be links (and descriptions or names if available) while it would be on the user to navigate the various layers however they wish until they find something they're interested in.