Webrings? Really?
416 words.
I’ve now seen three different blog posts talking about bringing back webrings, roughly in reverse chronological order:
- Revisiting Revisiting Webrings – Scopique’s. In which we ponder how to implement a modern webring.
- What if Webrings, but Static Hosting? - cascading.space. In which we address the very real problem that you can’t normally put a webring on a static site.
- Remember Webrings? – Chasing Dings!. In which we just go ahead and make a webring out of a serverless function.
My initial thought on bringing back webrings is that this is a solution in search of a problem. I can’t think of any compelling reason to bring back webrings, other than the nostalgia factor. It’s inherently gatekeepery, but you can implement gated communities in far more effective ways in 2024.
But if I were to think about building a modern webring, I would probably think about the following considerations:
- Decentralization. I wouldn’t particularly want to join a webring that has some administrative gatekeeper who’s almost inevitably going to lose interest someday and drop the ball on some security issue that compromises every site in the webring. More than one person needs to be an administrator.
- Transparency. The data source for the list of sites belonging to the webring should be public. The easist thing to do is probably a github repo, with updates only being accepted through signed PRs.
- API. I’m undecided about this but it might need an API endpoint to query for the next site in the webring, so that disparate site owners can build their own UI to meet their own site designs. I’d probably want to build in some kind of blog category tags to query on, too. But somebody has to pay for hosting that.
- Javascript. I’d probably want to implement a pure Javascript baseline implementation in roughly the same way that third-party comment systems are done. To add this to my blog, for example, I’d only want to have to insert a single line of
<script src="https://wherever_the_script_is_hosted/webring.js" />into my page with maybe some parameters.
I probably wouldn’t be interested in putting a webring on my site unless it met at least those criteria.
But why do we need webrings when we have blogrolls? The only advantage I can think of to a webring over a blogroll is that you get to have complete strangers decide which sites your readers are redirected to.
Webrings just don’t seem necessary or even desirable anymore.
Archived Comments
Bhagpuss 2024-08-27T06:27:54Z Well said. The current nostalgiafest for things that weren’t that great in the first place is annoying. I mean, it happens all the time but it rarely affects anything i care about. All of the indie web stuff does. It dresses itself up as inclusive, giving control back to the creators and taking it away from the corporate but its primary effect is exclusionary, locking access behind a certain degree of knowledge and facility with technology that many potential readers and writers won’t be comfortable with and, more importantly, don’t need to become familiar with due to readily available and simpler alternatives.
Jaedia 2024-08-29T00:03:06Z
Yeah these are some great points. I love the nostalgia around them but I hadn’t really thought much about it until just now: who is on the webring? Will I be linked up with sites I simply do not idealogically agree with?? I can accept differences of opinion any day, but in this day and age …. :| blogrolls and sharing our posts in our little server and through hashtags on Mastodon are just fine for me. Perhaps there’s a small discoverability factor to a webring but it’s not something I’m in control of.
Saying this, I have been on like.. book blogger lists before, and I guess.. how is being listed in a webring with awkward sites any different to somebody adding you to their blogroll? and I thought of the answer to that before I’d even finished typing the question: because you may find yourself linking out to some alt right nutjob or something. Sure in theory it’s run by somebody who wouldn’t allow that kind of thing, but… I’m just too jaded. I dunno, I think there’s need to be a real good case for them.
Brenda Holloway 2024-08-29T07:31:13Z I just use the one I set up to jump randomly to people’s blogs. I doubt anyone else uses my blog roll or my webring gadget at all, but I do like the inherent discovery of randomness.
A thousand apologies, but I've disabled the third-party comment systems because I want to freeze the comment data for the time being. Your comments are still here, but I need to migrate them to a new thing I'm working on.
This is a homegrown DIY comment system I'm working on. It technically works but it hasn't been through extensive testing yet. Good luck. Go here to enter a comment on this post without Javascript.