Blogrolls and Web Rings
Before big tech commandeered the internet from the people and pushed us to the margins, we had our own social network of sorts.
Not an algorithm, or a predatory data sponge to follow us around, but a simple hyperlink to another human’s homepage.
Rebuilding
This morning I had a feeling. A feeling of excitement as the building blocks of a new World Wide Web was forming. This isn’t another proprietary platform owned by yet another sociopath from the valley, but the old standards we used to rely on creaking slowly back to life.
The simple act of linking to another person’s personal blog or website was the foundation of the old web. It was a sign that you found enjoyment in that person’s efforts. Sometimes they would reciprocate and a web-ring would start to form.
Add a few more pages into the mix and you could theoretically spend hours reading what other humans had put their soul into.
Over on Mastodon, I discovered a guy named David had started a human-made web-ring, which you can find here: Human-Made
If you look up, you’ll find a Blogroll page has been added. These are a few of the blogs I’ve been following in an RSS reader. On that note, RSS is another foundational technology that big tech would like you to forget about.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication is a way for blogs to push out their content in a way that can be picked up by reader software. For us it is a way to follow a lot of blogs without needing to navigate to each one. You simply get a chronological feed in your reader. Meta and Google would rather keep you hooked on their algorithm instead.
My favourite RSS reader at the moment is (unfortunately) Mac and iOS only at the moment, but it is called Reeder. Reeder has the added benefit of giving you a way to also follow Youtube channels with none of the ads. It will also split any video or audio content in an RSS feed into a section of its own.
It costs around £10 per year, but it is more than worth it. These days I constantly seem to land on sites that want to share my browsing with thousands of ‘partners’. I know it is the way these sites make money, but do they need to be so invasive? Anyway, RSS readers skirt around all that.
Kagi Small Web
I’ve briefly mentioned this before, but the Kagi Small Web is proving to be an excellent resource. The search engine called Kagi has been compiling a very long list of smaller websites into the mother of all web-rings, organising them into categories and letting you browse through them at your leisure. There is also an app for iOS and Android, but you can check it out here: Kagi Small Web
It could just be that I’m in the the fediverse bubble, but I am getting a real kick out of the desire to wrestle back some control of the internet from the companies which have so far proved to be dreadful stewards of it.
The future is human-made, chronological and deliberate.
