You need a webring

forthwall 74 points 50 comments July 05, 2026
shub.club · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (14 comments)

amenghra

Using a Cloudflare Worker to implement a web 0.9 feature

hahahaa

Another option is a Wander: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759

lwhsiao

I prefer opening: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs The main idea being that you don't actually need to coordinate a real ring of links to easily link to posts on other blogs that you like.

galaxyLogic

Not sure I get it. Why a "ring"? Why not just have a list of web-site URLs on a page and share that page with your friends and ask them to put that page somewhere on their site? "Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly. Isn't it better to provide a list of links so users can choose where they want to go "next"? And why should I have to go around the whole "ring" to get back to where I started from? The Web is based on hyperlinks, not "hyper-rings".

heikkilevanto

And you need to stop telling everyone what we need! "You might be interested in this <thing> if you have this and that" sounds so much more reasonable.

ravetcofx

This is what will keep the web more human as we go forward into AI slop commercial web crap. Hand build your sites, talk about things your passionate about, share stories, art, things you make. And the web-ring connects you too others in the community with things you share similar interests in. This is what the web was for. Not everything needs to be about making money

ajxs

In case you want a webring, but don't feel like setting up your own server to run it, I run a webring hosting service that you might find useful: https://webri.ng/

chopete3

The what and how parts are good but "why webring?" needs to be explained more. If the content is summarized and personalized for the user the search engine is already rendering similar pages.

shruubi

> n+0 friends Does this still hold if n=0?

throwaway0665

I followed the web ring on the home page and the first person didn't continue the ring (they had no link to next) and the second webring only contained one other site. Pretty disappointing introduction to something I "need".

deadbabe

Back in 2011, Yahoo’s obsession with gaining control of all webrings basically led to their downfall under Marissa Mayer.

JKCalhoun

I have no friends. Anyone else have a nerdy blog they want to ring me in? I'll point to the next one. (engineersneedart.com)

dr_kretyn

Am I missing something? The person advocates for something that they don't use? I likely don't understand the idea behind it because I was expecting to see links to other pages on that page.

techcode

> "By the time Yahoo stopped controlling webring.org in 2001, search engines had become good enough that web rings were no longer as useful." Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.

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