2018/webring

From IndieWeb

IndieWeb Ring; Users Group was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2018.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/webring

Video: ▢️47:55s


IndieWeb Summit 2018
Session: IndieWeb Ring; Users Group
When: 2018-06-26 16:45

Participants

Notes

https://indieweb.org/webring

What is a web ring?

  • dougbeal: a series of links between web pages that take you around in a loop
  • gRegor: used one on geocities. was centralized, so you'd sign up and they would give you a snipped to put on your site
  • jgmac1106: did the hashtag replace the web ring?
    • dori: a hashtag takes you to a post, not a person
    • macgenie: the one-a-time nature leads to a different kind of discovery

We link to https://hotlinewebring.club/

  • gRegor: this one is pretty new, 2016 or 17

Lillian Karabaic: webrings.org was bought by Yahoo and it broke their management tools. Yahoo required webrings to have a Yahoo account to be the "ringmaster", and it gave admin rights to the first person with a Yahoo account that logged in! Several webrings died because the original admins couldn't get them back.

  • owner of the site eventually got it back, too late.
  • "Yahoo killed webring ringmasters. Don't be Yahoo."

Important parts:

  • forward
  • backward
  • random buttons
  • breaking the ring (by not putting the links on your site) got you booted
  • the ringmaster was really in control of which sites were in the ring, what orders they go in.
    • anomalily maintained a pretty-boys-in-bands web ring. also part of a "i didn't go to prom" web ring, which was really interesting to flip through.
    • its very discovery-oriented, like blogrolls.
    • search killed this kind of discovery because it became so much easier to find things.
    • but now google controls what we see with their algorithms. bringing back things like web rings would give us control over our journeys through the web.
    • this could also be used for bad things, of course. "web ring of people who pirate TV shows"

Dori: usually an affinity group

Jared:

  • are we setting up a webring here?
  • or developing some indieweb protocols?

anomalily:

  • making webrings cool again is probably very different from making them work on top of IndieWeb building blocks

macgenie / anomalily: web rings are a fun hole to spend time in. a kind of alternative to the dopamine refreshing for new posts on facebook.

  • micro.blog has micro monday - long post recommending one new person to follow, in opposition to "follow friday" which is are scattershot posts full of names with no reasons why they're interesting.

anomalily: being part of an affinity network outside of google could help define/engage with audience who reads her site.

  • has a "part of the indieweb" in the footer of her site. would rather have that be links to other people.

sidebar on web counters. and whether they're accurate.

  • other suspected shady "realtime" info

jgmac1106 is looking for webrings in the wild and only finding archives.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/draupnir-ringmanager/

    • it was "a webring of people who attend the wpcamp in germany. Like it's 1997."

gRegor pulls up the story of tilde.club, a throwback to 80s/90s-style web hosting on unix systems.

https://tedium.co/2018/05/31/webring-history/

See Also