@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
Wow i got hit right in the nostalgies thinking about StumbleUpon
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/
@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.
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.
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.
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.
Website hosting is still a thing. Not everything needs to be self hosted.
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...
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
Then the entire browser becomes useless. I couldn't even post this comment without JavaScript.
Edit: I wish a search engine that only showed websites without JavaScript existed.
Duckduckgo has a no javascript mode.
Umatrix is great, you can configure it to automatically allow first party javascript, and if sites still dont work eneable bits until they do them lock those settings so the same bits will be enabled next time you're on that site.
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.
Kagi is also experimenting with small web
Man I wanna like Kagi but I keep reading batshit things from its founder
Be like him, but don't copy the batshit.
Man what a trip, felt like I was hopping around the old web again.
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.
What about https://webri.ng ?
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:
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.
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?
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?
I'm down.
You gotta be down to know whats up.
Stumbleupon was fun.
I miss old web shit.
Ninety zeros dot com was one of the Internet's weirdest best things.
This is a great idea. I didn't see a Linux subway yet, but the process for requesting new lines seems pretty simple.
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.
This is so cool!
What would be really cool would be an open source, federated version of DMOZ
Yes, please!
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?
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