Webring Technology

The UI is absolutely perfect. Please, don't change it.

Nice to see webrings become a thing again. First one I re-encountered was https://fediring.net also minimal but functional.

That time is now if you have a personal site and you don’t play the SEO game. I personally just link whatever I find interesting and Google and its ranking can go hug a cactus.

Wait, this must have been just before I entered the industry. What was Google's rationale? Didn't they start out determining popularity by reference count?

Edit: Ooh, I see. Interlinking clusters were considered fraudulent references.

Yeah, after the early 2000s, especially in 2017, I'm sure 99% of webring usage was either zombie webrings on untouched sites or a small group of revivalists trying to bring them back like the smolweb. Neither seem adequate to extend the "heyday".

Same with those "top sites" websites where you had to beg users to click on the tiny referral banner to vote for your website.

I haven't seen a webring in the wild since the early 2000s except on zombie websites found on Marginalia.

Aren't webmentions/trackback/pingback supposed to solve the "replying to" use case? Is the advantage here that this works on static content?

Forgive me if I sound negative but I don't actually get this.

> standard to allow websites to link to each other.

But websites can already link to each other, using html links? There's even XFN to add metadata to such links.

We used to call this a "blogroll".

> a newline separated list of domains

why not list of URIs?

i don't like the tendency that every real-life authority (businnes, org, school, town, community, person) has its own domain. DNS was meant to be hierarchical.

i get it that "it happened to be this way" because of the bad decisions of various web tech (or the absolute lack of coordination between them). but we at least may escape from it. when a person or many of small communities, or often even a town has its own domain name, they usually does not manage it, not even own it. they outsource this heavy IT duty to an IT company. so in reality the IT company controls the domain.

then why IT-competent people today treat example-person.com and example-school.com being controlled by separate authorities while treat example-hosting.com/~person and example-hosting.com/~school by the same? example-person.com and example-school.com are both controlled by the same hosting company. "because example-hosting.com/~person can set cookies on example-hosting.com/~school" they say. – ok, she should not. hte public suffix list is also the product of bad tech.

I just throw them on the junkheap of non-free licenses and ignore any software that uses it. CNPL, FAFOL, etc are junk licenses as far as I am concerned. Not worth the trouble. There's plenty MIT/BSD/(A)GPL/etc software to use instead.

That sounds like a morality clause - i.e. they intend to deny access to the software to entities engaged in child labor. Putting aside whether or not 'good' people should deny 'evil' people access to FOSS, and if we can even agree on a consistent set of morals to embed in our licenses[0], the main problem with these licenses is getting courts to correctly interpret them as we intend.

Copyright is a virus that creators can use to harm people who use their creative work, so any ambiguity in licensing at all is a trap that can be sprung at any time to subject users to billion dollar lawsuits. In fact, you already pointed out one. Conversely, any tightly drafted morality clauses is likely going to be easily worked around by exactly the kinds of organizations you want to exclude from use of your software.

To make things even worse, there's this weird trend of postmodern licensing, where you deliberately write licenses that are difficult to interpret[1]. Licenses that only apply to the dead, or extremely vague "software must be used for Good, not Evil, as we interpret it" kinds of morality clauses that I railed against above. If combined with a real license, these are harmless (because you can just take the actually FOSS terms). But standalone, these are all very expensive and dangerous rugpulls waiting to happen.

[0] For example: should Planned Parenthood, the National Rifle Association, and/or the American Civil Liberties Union be allowed to use Ethical Source licensed code?

[1] Stuff like WTFPL could at least be construed as a weirdly drafted permissive license.

The use is and was, to discover new sites on a specific interesting topic.

It's like the difference between a curated collection and flipping through a card catalog.