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

submitted 3 months ago by mac to c/opensource

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18299168

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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I have a vision of starting a community.

Basically building a set of tools to help people host content with just plain HTML and CSS, using static personal hosting and organically sharing links like the pioneer days of the web.

I think that the shift to client-side scripting, like tracking pixels, algorithmic content, infinite scrolling, targeted advertising, etc is how we ended up with the monoculture we see today.

Just disable JavaScript on your browser and 99% of those things go sway and we can support people building personal homepages again.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I built personal webpages in the 1990s, and still do it now, I included javascript then, and still do now - to make calculations, show interactive graphics, quantitative stuff about climate change - see for example this model.
I get your concept, that more websites should be written and hosted by individuals not big tech - but javascript is not the essence of the problem - js is just calculating stuff client-side for efficiency. In theory big tech could still serve up personalised algorithm-driven feeds and targeted advertising, just with server-side page generation (like php) and a few cookies, would waste more bandwidth but no stress to them. Whereas disabling client side calculations would kill what i do, as I can't as an individual afford to host big calculations on cloud servers (which is also technically harder).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, this isn't supposed to be a silver bullet, it's more about democratizing the internet more.

I think that

Low barrier to entry
Focus on users owning their own content
Privacy is more important than advanced functionality

I.e. if you want to start a blog, it should be easy own it and host it yourself rather than surrending your content to Twitter and Facebook. Make it accessible to others who also want to surf the web without being targeted and tracked.

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