In case you want a webring, but don't feel like setting up your own server to run it, I run a webring hosting service that you might find useful: https://webri.ng/
Not sure I get it. Why a "ring"? Why not just have a list of web-site URLs on a page and share that page with your friends and ask them to put that page somewhere on their site?
"Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly. Isn't it better to provide a list of links so users can choose where they want to go "next"?
And why should I have to go around the whole "ring" to get back to where I started from? The Web is based on hyperlinks, not "hyper-rings".
It doesn't neccessarly have to be such a "ring" that you navigate from website #1 to website #2 and the order is always the same, and you cannot jump, or even do random browsing.
I think initially the idea was mainly around the "ring" concept, but relatively quickly lots of different implementations did lots of different things, and we still called those "webrings" even though many weren't conceptually "rings" at all, more like "lists of websites that are kind of somewhat about the same thing, sometimes". There was typically a "Random" button/link too, and index, sometimes categories and more.
It can be a list of websites, with random order, the main point is people's websites linking to other people's websites, in some way, that it could eventually circle back somehow, then you have a webring.
So part of it seems to be working together: I link to your site with the expectation that you link back to mine. Not a bad idea, also letting the site-creators coordinate who focuses on which sub-topic. But are there many examples of this in the real web?
uh, the webring idea is OLD. Not quite "And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge" old but close.
I always felt similarly about webrings as I did about demoscene. It's less about being strictly practical and more about just a fun little thing you made with your friends. I'd argue that in this day and age, building something from the ground up to be suboptimal by design is a little protest against the quantification and hustle-fication of everything all the time.
Having it be a ring has the nice side effect that anyone closing a ring on your site (or adding your site to it) gets an idea of how everyone in the ring met.
It's more of a fuzzy social thing than a "let's represent social relationships in the most semantically accurate way possible" thing, and for people, I think that knowing how everyone met eachother is a nice thing. You can plan gettogethers off of that. It also keeps people socially accountable; if someone in the group turns out to be a dick, they can just be skipped in the webring.
A webring is a circular doubly linked list - to insert a new site, you only need two existing sites to update their links. It's decentralized and works with any tech stack, including editing a static HTML file.
It's a little silly if everyone is working off a centrally-maintained JSON file, you might as well turn it into a blogroll at that point.
>"Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly.
Ring is also a group of people, sometimes unified by a single purpose and lead by a "ringleader". That's the way webring is being used.
I think it's purely nostalgia from the early days of the web, from before search engines existed. The first webring came out in 1995! Over 30 years ago.
I think there was some sense of creating something to explore, where you didn't get to choose where to go next, there was more serendipity involved due to someone else's curation. No, it doesn't really make sense from a usability or practicality perspective, which is why despite OP, you don't really see them any more.
This is what will keep the web more human as we go forward into AI slop commercial web crap. Hand build your sites, talk about things your passionate about, share stories, art, things you make. And the web-ring connects you too others in the community with things you share similar interests in. This is what the web was for. Not everything needs to be about making money
I’ve been reading optimistic things like this on HN for long years now, but the world keeps moving in the opposite direction. Your post doesn’t confront the fact that the vast majority of people interested in your passions, stories, or art no longer follow third-party websites. Younger generations have grown up with the phone as default device, and they use it in a way that discourages discovery outside of social media or other for-profit apps.
In the early millennium, blogging was of course a niche interest, but one could still commonly meet people IRL who followed the same blogs; they were part of a real-life feeling of community. Blogs about local politics, religious denominations, or music-band fandom gained enough readers from those audiences to cause real-world consequences. When people are nostalgic about blogging, it’s also about blogging having been something that mattered societally.
I feel like this is what keeps ruining things, in almost any hobby/sector/ecosystem I come across. Initially, as the only people interested in the thing is doing the thing because it's fun and interesting, everything works out great, people helping people because helping people is fun and the thing is fun.
After a while, somehow it starts to bring in money for some people, others start to see people earning money and then the money-optimizers eventually arrive, sucking all the fun out of the ecosystem since all they care about is money, money and money, and tons of more money-optimizers arrive after the initial batch made their success, and around we go until it's all commercial slop all over the place that drowns out all the authentic stuff that initially was almost everything in the community.
Seemingly non-profit groups with events held in actual venues where you can face-to-face show your disgust towards these people seem to be the only way of having communities that last for decades around a fun and interesting thing, anything online seems to fall victim to the above way too quickly.
And you need to stop telling everyone what we need! "You might be interested in this <thing> if you have this and that" sounds so much more reasonable.
Yeah I was being tounge in cheek calling a PHP script serverless because technically it is (no need to install stuff and configure a server) but it predates the hype days. Like calling a word doc "nosql"
This should be just a static page… Cloudflare pages are perfect for this. All updating could be done in the repo by special scripts from MD or some other files.
"Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly. Isn't it better to provide a list of links so users can choose where they want to go "next"?
And why should I have to go around the whole "ring" to get back to where I started from? The Web is based on hyperlinks, not "hyper-rings".
I think initially the idea was mainly around the "ring" concept, but relatively quickly lots of different implementations did lots of different things, and we still called those "webrings" even though many weren't conceptually "rings" at all, more like "lists of websites that are kind of somewhat about the same thing, sometimes". There was typically a "Random" button/link too, and index, sometimes categories and more.
It can be a list of websites, with random order, the main point is people's websites linking to other people's websites, in some way, that it could eventually circle back somehow, then you have a webring.
Having it be a ring has the nice side effect that anyone closing a ring on your site (or adding your site to it) gets an idea of how everyone in the ring met.
It's more of a fuzzy social thing than a "let's represent social relationships in the most semantically accurate way possible" thing, and for people, I think that knowing how everyone met eachother is a nice thing. You can plan gettogethers off of that. It also keeps people socially accountable; if someone in the group turns out to be a dick, they can just be skipped in the webring.
It's a little silly if everyone is working off a centrally-maintained JSON file, you might as well turn it into a blogroll at that point.
I think there was some sense of creating something to explore, where you didn't get to choose where to go next, there was more serendipity involved due to someone else's curation. No, it doesn't really make sense from a usability or practicality perspective, which is why despite OP, you don't really see them any more.
The main idea being that you don't actually need to coordinate a real ring of links to easily link to posts on other blogs that you like.
In the early millennium, blogging was of course a niche interest, but one could still commonly meet people IRL who followed the same blogs; they were part of a real-life feeling of community. Blogs about local politics, religious denominations, or music-band fandom gained enough readers from those audiences to cause real-world consequences. When people are nostalgic about blogging, it’s also about blogging having been something that mattered societally.
I feel like this is what keeps ruining things, in almost any hobby/sector/ecosystem I come across. Initially, as the only people interested in the thing is doing the thing because it's fun and interesting, everything works out great, people helping people because helping people is fun and the thing is fun.
After a while, somehow it starts to bring in money for some people, others start to see people earning money and then the money-optimizers eventually arrive, sucking all the fun out of the ecosystem since all they care about is money, money and money, and tons of more money-optimizers arrive after the initial batch made their success, and around we go until it's all commercial slop all over the place that drowns out all the authentic stuff that initially was almost everything in the community.
Seemingly non-profit groups with events held in actual venues where you can face-to-face show your disgust towards these people seem to be the only way of having communities that last for decades around a fun and interesting thing, anything online seems to fall victim to the above way too quickly.
These days you could do this in client side JS, mayhe fetch the static list from a Gitgub blob or one of the sites in the group.
(Sorry, I guess “serverless” is not a buzzword I’ll ever understand)