Smallweb Subway
gusbus.space

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
    42·
    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.

      • mrpalmer16OP
        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.

    • 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?

    • 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
          41·
          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

    • 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)English
    20·
    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)English
        4·
        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:

        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.orgEnglish
          6·
          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 (he/they)English
            2·
            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.

        • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
          2·
          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 (he/they)English
            1·
            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.

            • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
              2·
              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 (he/they)English
                2·
                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.

      • maegul (he/they)English
        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
    12·
    5 months ago

    Stumbleupon was fun.

    I miss old web shit.

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

  • Last@reddthat.com
    111·
    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.

    • 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).