💾 Archived View for gem.sdf.org › jdd › posts › 20220409_breakage.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:38:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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<2022-04-10>
Ever have an idea, write it up, and then discover that someone else is way ahead of you, making everything you've just written rather pointless? No? Well, that just happened to me. So go on, go read this instead:
The Small Website Discoverability Crisis
Before this post became a meditation on how other people steal my ideas before I even have them, and then come up with better solutions, it was going to be by way of a reply to:
Gemini appealed to me when I first heard about it, in part because I already had been thinking about how one might at least partially secede from the modern web. Admittedly, my thoughts did not go very far, just some idle speculation about carving out a section of the web reserved for the kinds of hobbyist, DIY, surveillance-free websites that were typical of the 90s. They do still exist, though their numbers grow fewer with the passing years. Wouldn't it be nice to have a part of the web in which one could wander undisturbed by crass commercialism, distracting pop-ups, and the ever-present eye of the Watchers, I thought to myself.
At the time, it seemed a good baseline for whether to include sites in such a space might be whether they were navigable in Dillo, which is javascript-free, and only implements a subset of CSS. But, unable to conceptualize any practical way of making that happen, I dropped the idea and moved on to other things. The thought of creating a separate protocol entirely, with its own markup language, servers and client applications, didn't occur to me at all. And frankly even if it had I could not have mustered the personal and community resources required to make such a thing real. So, boundless respect to Solderpunk for having done so.
I guess I didn't completely give up on the idea though, since I eventually went ahead and implemented the simplest possible version of it: a list of links on my personal home page. I started with fewer than ten, and now I'm up to about 30. Most of these links go to sites that were created many years ago, and still linger on in something resembling their original state. Some are still being updated, some aren't. And of course my home page itself is coded so that it works in Dillo. Or mostly ... I do use a bit of javascript, but the site doesn't rely on it. If you're interested in checking it out, it's here:
Now, here's the thing. Since arriving in geminispace I've come across posts written by a few others who are also keeping lists of sites that preserve the spirit of the old web. Which leads to a silly idea: If there are enough of us out there, it might be possible to create a webring, which in itself has a decidedly retro, DIY appeal if you ask me. I would be willing to act as ringmaster. Please send me an email at jdd@sdf.org if you'd like to get this going! There only needs to be 3 of us out there to start it up, though more would be nice.
It may seem a bit odd that I'm proposing a webring in geminispace. Why not a gemring (or whatever such a thing might be called)?
Well, I'm proposing it here because unsurprisingly there seem to be a lot of folks in geminispace who share my sense of loss at what the modern web has become. I'm not sure where else I could find so many intelligent and interesting folks who feel that way.
A webring seems preferable to a gemring in this case because all these links will be going to the web, so we might as well start from there.
The concept of a gemring is interesting but perhaps a bit premature. It seems to me the number of active gemini participants is still small enough that discovery applications like Antenna and Cosmos are preferable.
"Web rings are cute, but I think they are a bit too random to help." So said marginalia.nu (see the link that leads off this post), and I think I agree. I prefer marginalia's idea, that we simply link to other people's bookmark lists we find interesting. So that's just what I'll do.
Re: Re: Everything Breaks was published on 2022-04-10