Even before that, I just implemented a blogroll (or list of shared links, as I prefer to call it) at https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&link=1&view=sha... Maybe your blog is also in it!? I manually picked most of the bookmarks/feeds I follow from HN.
The basis of all these rolls, lists and rings are - of course - hyperlinks. RSS and OPML are silently working in the background. I think there's still unfulfilled potential for RSS as a replacement for social media, because the open web is already social media.
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".
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.
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?
> I link to your site with the expectation that you link back to mine.
I guess, but more collectively, so like "We both agree to share a list of websites we link to, and anyone who want to add their site to this list also agree to the same". It used to be popular in music, programming and web development blogs, that much I remember, but I can't say how popular it was at large, the web and the internet was pretty much mostly a geeky thing at the time (around 2000s).
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.
"Master System ruled unchallenged, the key to breaking its power -- five microchips disguised as gold rings, carefully hidden away.", Rings of the Master by Jack L. Chalker
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.
But extremely fragile since if even one node in the network goes down the network is broken and if two go down then there will be sites no longer reachable from others. You want to know the other nodes in the network so you can deal with nodes that go down or leave the network.
>"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.
No, the original webrings from 1995 were literally rings - each site linked to one other site in the ring, and eventually one of them would link back to the “first” site, making an actual ring.
Nope. There was no "first" site as you say - it was literally just a list of links.
The most innovative ones were iframes of a single source of links (iframes were all the rage, unless of course you clicked "no frames" as a user, because your internet was so slow).
But even the less formal ones simply listed links to other sites, there was no visit order, and definitely was not directional/circular.
It's "ring" like a boxing ring - as in "those within the ring" not a directional loop like you mention.
> To be a part of the webring, each site has a common navigation bar; it contains links to the previous and next sites. By selecting next (or previous) repeatedly, the user will eventually reach the site they started at; this is the origin of the term "webring."
But, it was a fundamentally silly structure for the web, so many sites implemented something beyond the ring structure, which is what you're describing. Technically, those weren't webrings in the above sense.
Webrings kinda went away when "blogging" became the new thing, and then there were blogrolls and pingbacks and delicio.us and whathaveyou. That got supplanted by the larger glurge into social media with friendster, then myspaces top 8, and now everyone is just on facebook saying "what's the point?".
Indeed. As mentioned, its for personal sites as a lightweight way to share a link to a friends site that may or may not be related, rather than a list of affiliates or sponsors or whatever.
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.
Am I missing something? The person advocates for something that they don't use? I likely don't understand the idea behind it because I was expecting to see links to other pages on that page.
I see! It's on the home page, close to the top. I recall these next/prev on every page and either in nav or in the footer so completely missed those buttons. Thanks!
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/
In a webring, do you usually always have the same fixed webring neighbours?
Back in the days, how did it usually work about this :
If your neighbour has only 7 visitor/day but you do have 100/day, can you ask to change and have this other 10000 visitor/day-site as neighbour?
As a webring admin, how do you manage these member requests?
> "By the time Yahoo stopped controlling webring.org in 2001, search engines had become good enough that web rings were no longer as useful."
Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.
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.
This is one reason I'm kinda fond of a lot of fan media related communities. Since things like fanfiction, mods and fan games are in legally murky territory, you can't really make money off of them, especially not directly.
It's a great deterrent against grifters and optimisers, since you can't sell your work and you can't set up a company to commercialise it, so anyone uninterested in the community or series has no incentive to get involved.
Sadly, it's really hard to achieve something similar in most fields, due to the incentive to turn everything into a side hustle.
I followed the web ring on the home page and the first person didn't continue the ring (they had no link to next) and the second webring only contained one other site. Pretty disappointing introduction to something I "need".
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.
In this case it would be “you might be interested in this <thing> if you have an unexamined and irrational hankering for pointless mid-1990s web tech.”
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.
I recently added Wander to a website of mine (https://www.heyhomepage.com/wander/). Before that, I became a proud member of the small Tech Makers webring (at the bottom of https://www.theredpanther.org/).
Even before that, I just implemented a blogroll (or list of shared links, as I prefer to call it) at https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&link=1&view=sha... Maybe your blog is also in it!? I manually picked most of the bookmarks/feeds I follow from HN.
The basis of all these rolls, lists and rings are - of course - hyperlinks. RSS and OPML are silently working in the background. I think there's still unfulfilled potential for RSS as a replacement for social media, because the open web is already social media.
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".
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.
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?
> I link to your site with the expectation that you link back to mine.
I guess, but more collectively, so like "We both agree to share a list of websites we link to, and anyone who want to add their site to this list also agree to the same". It used to be popular in music, programming and web development blogs, that much I remember, but I can't say how popular it was at large, the web and the internet was pretty much mostly a geeky thing at the time (around 2000s).
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.
"Master System ruled unchallenged, the key to breaking its power -- five microchips disguised as gold rings, carefully hidden away.", Rings of the Master by Jack L. Chalker
https://www.goodreads.com/series/41810-rings-of-the-master
Importantly, webrings are not known to allow their users to live unnaturally long lives, and webring-wraiths have never been observed hunting them.
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.
We could always build a DHT instead
>It's decentralized
But extremely fragile since if even one node in the network goes down the network is broken and if two go down then there will be sites no longer reachable from others. You want to know the other nodes in the network so you can deal with nodes that go down or leave the network.
If those are concerns to you, you are not really the target audience.
>"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.
Yeah. This is it. #RollsOverRings
I used to hate and ignore webrings back in the days.
However I usually spent times in the links section of every website I visited.
A ring can be extended by any single node without having to coordinate with everyone in the group.
Think more like "boxing ring" in that everything inside the circle is "in the ring".
The weird one is actually "rink" as in "skating rink" – because it derives from the word for "line".
So what you're talking about might actually be called a "web rink" if it existed, in that links flow in a linear fashion.
No, the original webrings from 1995 were literally rings - each site linked to one other site in the ring, and eventually one of them would link back to the “first” site, making an actual ring.
Nope. There was no "first" site as you say - it was literally just a list of links.
The most innovative ones were iframes of a single source of links (iframes were all the rage, unless of course you clicked "no frames" as a user, because your internet was so slow).
But even the less formal ones simply listed links to other sites, there was no visit order, and definitely was not directional/circular.
It's "ring" like a boxing ring - as in "those within the ring" not a directional loop like you mention.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring :
> To be a part of the webring, each site has a common navigation bar; it contains links to the previous and next sites. By selecting next (or previous) repeatedly, the user will eventually reach the site they started at; this is the origin of the term "webring."
But, it was a fundamentally silly structure for the web, so many sites implemented something beyond the ring structure, which is what you're describing. Technically, those weren't webrings in the above sense.
> It's "ring" like a boxing ring
Nice retcon, but wrong.
It's a web 1.0 thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
this was a popular one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ate_my_balls
Webrings kinda went away when "blogging" became the new thing, and then there were blogrolls and pingbacks and delicio.us and whathaveyou. That got supplanted by the larger glurge into social media with friendster, then myspaces top 8, and now everyone is just on facebook saying "what's the point?".
Indeed. As mentioned, its for personal sites as a lightweight way to share a link to a friends site that may or may not be related, rather than a list of affiliates or sponsors or whatever.
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.
yes, the early days when the web was mostly decentralised and members of a community had their own individual sites.
Kids these days...
Am I missing something? The person advocates for something that they don't use? I likely don't understand the idea behind it because I was expecting to see links to other pages on that page.
It's the left and right arrows on the homepage. There's two rings.
I see! It's on the home page, close to the top. I recall these next/prev on every page and either in nav or in the footer so completely missed those buttons. Thanks!
I have no friends.
Anyone else have a nerdy blog they want to ring me in? I'll point to the next one.
(engineersneedart.com)
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/
In a webring, do you usually always have the same fixed webring neighbours?
Back in the days, how did it usually work about this : If your neighbour has only 7 visitor/day but you do have 100/day, can you ask to change and have this other 10000 visitor/day-site as neighbour?
As a webring admin, how do you manage these member requests?
> "By the time Yahoo stopped controlling webring.org in 2001, search engines had become good enough that web rings were no longer as useful."
Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.
I prefer opening: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs
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.
The what and how parts are good but "why webring?" needs to be explained more.
If the content is summarized and personalized for the user the search engine is already rendering similar pages.
This comment is such an elegant Rorschach test. Bravo.
Why? Are you implying his lack of imagination? Or how one can interpret the comment?
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.
> Not everything needs to be about making money
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.
This is one reason I'm kinda fond of a lot of fan media related communities. Since things like fanfiction, mods and fan games are in legally murky territory, you can't really make money off of them, especially not directly.
It's a great deterrent against grifters and optimisers, since you can't sell your work and you can't set up a company to commercialise it, so anyone uninterested in the community or series has no incentive to get involved.
Sadly, it's really hard to achieve something similar in most fields, due to the incentive to turn everything into a side hustle.
I followed the web ring on the home page and the first person didn't continue the ring (they had no link to next) and the second webring only contained one other site. Pretty disappointing introduction to something I "need".
Which site has no next button? I think some of them hide them put them in menus!
Thanks that helped me find them - my bad.
> n+0 friends
Does this still hold if n=0?
Another option is a Wander: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759
Back in 2011, Yahoo’s obsession with gaining control of all webrings basically led to their downfall under Marissa Mayer.
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.
In this case it would be “you might be interested in this <thing> if you have an unexamined and irrational hankering for pointless mid-1990s web tech.”
Using a Cloudflare Worker to implement a web 0.9 feature
Yeah seems overkill. Back in the day (1990s) you'd use a serverless script in the "Personal HomePage" language.
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.
Pardon, how do you do a serverless php page?
Well, shared hosts let you upload the PHP file via FTP (or secure FTP if lucky!) to ~/public_html and serve it without administering a server.
That’s still running on a server.
(Sorry, I guess “serverless” is not a buzzword I’ll ever understand)
Serverless is just a server that has been abstracted away enough by magical APIs to let you (partially) ignore the underlying physical machines.
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.
Why not. It's easy.