2018/webring

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

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

Video: ▶️47:55s

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

Participants

• dougbeal (facilitator)
• gRegor Morrill
• Marty McGuire
• Jared W
• Dori
• Greg McVerry
• Jean MacDonald
• Jon Hayes
• Lillian Karabaic

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.

• found an old WP Camp Webring plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-camp-webring/ (updating 5 years ago)
  • it has a hardcoded list of URLs in it https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-camp-webring/trunk/wp-camp-webring.php

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.

• http://tilde.club/~notjosh/
• https://tilde.town/~um/tilde_ring/join.html

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

See Also

• 2018/Schedule