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Bring Back Webrings

arne.me

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Re: Bring Back Webrings

#71

Post by dragontamer »

autoexec wrote: post #68
constantly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t arbitrate here, but can add my anecdote to bolster what the person above is saying: I regularly remember clicking next on webrings and eventually getting a 404 with no way to progress. This was fairly regular to the extent that I sometimes just avoided clicking the webring modal.

Yeah, I remember it both ways. Sometimes you'd click on a link at the bottom of one page to hit a dead end, but you could also go to the homepage of the webring itself and you could navigate through the sites in an iframe where you'd still run into a bunch of 404s, but you'd at least still have a "next" button in a separate frame so you could roll the dice again. Webrings require maintenance to be useful and worth us…

> just like search engines do

Given how easy it is to run PostgreSQL and full text search these days, I think boutique search engines for small communities makes more sense than a webring.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#72

Post by sekou »

ActivityPub potentially helps to solve this. With enough well-exposed/accessible connections to sites or posts you might be able to traverse around a network and collect similar items. There are a lot of other challenges there but it's a possibility.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#73

Post by AndrewKemendo »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #46
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #25

I was thinking about this less an hour ago Specifically I want my personal site to be a part of a “web 1.0” ring, where everyone uses technology that predates web 2.0 frameworks (Wordpress, AWS, CF etc…) and you generally roll your own everything.

I like the idea, but ugh do not bring back the asinine "Web 2.0" term. Fortunately "Web3" has failed to gain the hype "Web 2.0" did. Stupid labels should die already, starting with "Gen [whatever]."

What term would you use to differentiate?

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#74

Post by praisewhitey »

dragontamer wrote: post #51
swatcoder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintain them Maintain what? They’re documents. They document things. As long as there’s a tool that knows how to parse the document, which is outside the role of the author, the document remains complete. There’s nothing to maintain. The contemporary fetish for timely ephemera is a quirk of social media feeds and a generation that grew up immersed in them, not some baseline criteria for how the internet needs to w…

> Maintain what? Okay, you're kidding me right? Have you actually used Webrings? Lets say I click on a webring, and the "next" button goes to a 404 error. Now what? How do I access all the other links? Answer: you can't. Its basically lost information. Webrings require ALL the web-administrators in the ring to keep their previous-and-next links up-to-date, otherwise the whole ring collapses. There's a __reason__ why…

>Lets say I click on a webring, and the "next" button goes to a 404 error. Now what? How do I access all the other links?

An example of this from the OP link. The page links to a11y-webring.club which has prev/next/random buttons that all produce this error:

This function has crashed

An unhandled error in the function code triggered the following message:

Runtime.UserCodeSyntaxError - SyntaxError: Unexpected token ':'

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#75

Post by brisray »

Everyone has made some good points about webrings and other methods of getting personal websites noticed.

Webrings should have a place - they were great for bringing similarly themed sites together and were a way of finding smaller, personal sites. The latter is probably more important nowadays than ever.

The webring revival isn't doing so well. I write the list at https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm and I recently visited evey link in every webring listed. For whatever reason, the ringmasters or the site owners, only 20% of them are fully navigable. For most, clicking the next link will eventually lead to a 404 page.

These new webrings have other problems, one of which is the member subject range is much wider than that of the orginal webrings so you never know what you'll be looking at next.

I list webrings that have at least a back and forward link, to help everyone they really should have both a member list page and a random link. That would go a little way to stop some of the dead ends.

Links here, Reddit, Facebook or whatever are not the answer. They are ephemeral while webrings were supposed to be more or less permanent, at least until they were removed from the ring.

Clique listings and directory pages aren't that great either. The rate of link rot is phenomenal. Even after just a couple of months the links on my own pages start breaking. Links on pages more than a couple of years old are barely worth clicking on.

Personally, I'd like to see webrings make a comeback, but unless they get a grip the new ones are going to wither away because they aren't navigable.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#76

Post by shiroiuma »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #32
actionfromafar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, can't wait to monetize that! Oh, darn...

I mean, your skepticism isn't wrong as it's a definite catch-22... people want tools to share and create their own content, but those tools cost money which means someone has to get paid, at which point the vendors start thinking in terms of greater lock-in and embrace-and-extend opportunities, and the cycle repeats itself.

This was supposed to be the promise of open-source software: people making tools to share with everyone for free, so people don't need to pay vendors just to do something simple.

However, while software can be made free and open-source, someone still has to pay for servers to run for any of this stuff to work. These things were easier back in the good ol' days when everyone just used university computer resources. Nowadays, university tuition has skyrocketed, while universities are no longer freely hosting internet resources like before, I guess because they need to pay their deans millions and build really fancy new dorms.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#77

Post by NikkiA »

I'm honestly starting to find the 'web nostalgia' a little nauseating, I kinda like gemini, but it lacking inline images and other 'modernities' like that take it a little too far back. The web overall will never go back to how it was in whichever era you idolise (for me it was 1992-1994), so it's probably best that we stop wishing it would.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#78

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #73
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea, but ugh do not bring back the asinine "Web 2.0" term. Fortunately "Web3" has failed to gain the hype "Web 2.0" did. Stupid labels should die already, starting with "Gen [whatever]."

What term would you use to differentiate?

Differentiate what?

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#79

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

swatcoder wrote: post #50
dragontamer wrote: post #19

I'm fairly certain that link-aggregation sites, like Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, and Lemmy have taken the place of Webrings. The sad truth about webpages is that people don't want to maintain them. People will put in their weekend project, and then the webpage sits there for the rest of eternity whether or not its relevant, and then what? When do you update the webring so that they add and/or remove pages? H…

> maintain them Maintain what? They’re documents. They document things. As long as there’s a tool that knows how to parse the document, which is outside the role of the author, the document remains complete. There’s nothing to maintain. The contemporary fetish for timely ephemera is a quirk of social media feeds and a generation that grew up immersed in them, not some baseline criteria for how the internet needs to w…

Imagine if this criticism was levied at books.

James Clavell obviously doesn't care about Shogun, why ... it hasn't changed for years!?!?!

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#80

Post by bluSCALE4 »

dragontamer wrote: post #49
amlib wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have missed the point, it's more about decentralization and increasing "locality" of the internet, get people close to each other or with shared interest to have their own communities. Webrings may not be all that great of solution technically but it does the job in that front. Like in your wiki example, if A falls, now you don't have A B C D E F... well, the whole alphabet is gone :)

> Like in your wiki example, if A falls, now you don't have A B C D E F... well, the whole alphabet is gone :) Its far more likely for random individuals of a webring to disappear in my experience. Ex: A could be the starting point of the webring. When C disappears, then D, E, and F are inaccessible. (A -> B -> Broken page). A wiki is a single point of failure: you make A more reliable so that everyone has the inform…

Webrings don't have to be maintained, they just have to be up. They are snapshots in time that provide lots of information. Authors typically put in a lot of effort, unfiltered. The individuals voice shining through is the goal, learning more through links is a plus.
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