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Rain 🚱 @grainloom

about this from the project page:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

it looks like such a cool idea, why did people stop using it? :blobsad:

· Web · 3 · 4

@grainloom it was yahoos fault just like geocities, but also the culprit of proprietary software and frankly the improved capacities of search engines

@oct2pus @elomatreb For niche things it would be really cool to have tho.

@grainloom @elomatreb the only open source implimentation i found was sourceforge.net/projects/ringl apparently there were 3 more but i cant seem to find them

@grainloom we will get the internet elves to start forging Webrings of Power #webrings

@grainloom They were a big pain to keep up to date, unfortunately. Manageable in the early web, but exponential growth in the number of web pages made them untenable. Same thing happened with linkboxes on blogs, people just stopped updating them and all the links eventually broke.

(Yahoo fuckups apparently were part of the reason they died at the time they did, but I think they'd have gone away eventually no matter what.)

@grainloom I think it just fell out of style, sadly; likewise, Usenet was very good, but with the marketing force of large sites, people eventually ceased coming along, coupled with ISPs dropping Usenet from their standard offerings. It also proved awkward to maintain such rings, so sometimes they’d break or just cease updating.

@grainloom omg yes I remember these... they broke pretty often though IIRC

@pursuitofnerdiness broke as in led to dead links or broke in some other way?

@grainloom @pursuitofnerdiness what if we automated these things rather than do them manually like we used to? Have your ring arrows link to the next point in the chain if your preset link is broken.

@pursuitofnerdiness @grainloom oh looks like these *were* automated.. probably not all that well if they kept breaking as much as I remember them breaking :p

@grainloom We can still link to other «friends websites», right? I

@melunaka last time I checked the <a> tag still worked, so yeah, probably.

@grainloom I mean, lots of blogs have that section where it links to other cool websites ^^