But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.
I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.
I prefer Mark Twain's “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the personal websites are coming back.
Those were cool because only specific type of people were able to build websites, then the code free services for sharing content came along and everybody got online presence but because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium. The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't think we have found it just yet!
It might just be observation bias but it seems to me that personal websites and blogs are coming back at least for the kinds of people that might have had one in the old web. Perhaps the trend won't wash over the whole web but having a subculture that is at least as large as the old web would be great, no?
Regarding the lifetime of a site, it might be possible to submit requests to the Internet Archive or similar service whenever a site is added to a directory or a new post is found on it. That way too, it would be easier to see when a site is no longer active or when it turned into something else. Then, when it's deactivated, the web directory could just point to the archive first
I wonder how soon people will start to collaboratively train ML models for curation, by their acts if curation, much like spam filters are trained today.
I love to see this. The death of blogs and RSS is highly exaggerated. The idea that Google "killed" blogs by killing Google Reader is a meme that is more destructive than Google's act in itself.
There are countless healthy and active blogs that you can read via RSS. There are great RSS reader apps.
For us technically-minded folks we need to keep being proactive about helping people read the web via RSS, improving discovery, and continually making RSS a first-class option on sites we build.
I think people seem them as dead because a small percentage of internet users engage with them, but people forget that billions more people have access to the internet now. Even though it's a smaller percentage, the actual number of users has still gone up generally in my experience.
A shameless plug - I've built (recently) a simple yet powerful blog reader that could satisfy the needs of most people https://lenns.io. Why - it solves three primary issues with "traditional" readers:
1) You can follow websites (based on blog-post titles) when there isn't a proper RSS feed.
2) You have control on how many results per feed to have listed (e.g. not having your whole feed overloaded with the posts of one source)
3) You can assign priorities to Sources and categories so that you have control what's on top of your feed.
... if someone here bothers to give it a try, I'd be happy to receive any feedback.
> As most blogs and websites don't export the full content of their posts, that leads to a mixed reading experience. Quite often, you click the title of a post within a conventional reader only to see that there's nothing there apart from another link to the original post.
It’s the opposite for me. Almost every blog exports the full text. It used to be the other way, but that was in the GReader times.
> The feed reader for people that want to be in control
I find that a questionable headline with no self-hosting option.
And it misses screenshots, I never sign up blind for anything.
This sounds interesting to me. Not because RSS is broken, I hardly ever encounter a site without a feed. But the "only one best article per site per day" sounds very smart.
However...do I get this by e-mail? In an app? Web interface? Maybe you could add some screenshots to your page :-)
> Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days?
That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit.
Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.)
If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.
I believe that much of it is, indeed, basic nostalgia. Some of this, however, is also the recognition that not all of the early web was bad. Much of the early internet is viewed through rose-tinted glasses, but some of it was really good. For example, the ability to use a directory to find _exactly_ what you're looking for while search just feeds you two pages of paid result listings. Likewise, gopher made information available on even the most modest of machines (gemini trying to recreate something somewhat better) while modern web can spin up cooling fans on high-end laptop from 2019.
This is the best thing for RSS in a long time.
What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting. 'Nobody' reads the articles on link aggregators, (*e: just the comments). In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment.
I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts. Maybe ActivityPub makes that possible.
The only service of which I am aware that allows for comments on RSS is https://linklonk.com/ .
Are there other approaches to bring comments to RSS streams?
Maybe ooh.directory can use ActivityPub to allow commenting and voting on the entries. Comments on HN are great to check for problems with an article. That should also be true for comments about entire blogs.
> I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts
The IndieWeb community is focused on this with Social Readers[1] and Webmentions[2]. The core idea is your reader also ties into your own published feed, so you can make a comment right in your reader that publishes the comment to your own feed and sends a webmention to the original article so they know about it.
Barriers to entry are still kinda high (much like making a website 25 years ago) so any adoption should lead to a better signal/noise ratio. Unless it becomes popular enough for bots to start spamming the webmentions...
Webmention depends on the original source to link back to those comments for discovery though, right? I think perhaps a better approach would be a way to comment on any URL and see comments from other users (or communities) that you have subscribed to. That way the author of the content being discussed is not in a position to limit the discussion to what they approve of and you can discuss things that are not even opted into this system.
Ideally this system would also be integrated into browsers you you can see and write comments even when visiting a URL directly.
> What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting.
>In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment.
I share this view. What do you think about a concept wherein a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' with an email form? It will look like a regular comment textarea under some blogpost, but the commenting is done by email. The reaction isn't immediately visible under the blogpost (if at all) and therefor everything works humanly slow. But there's also no signup required, so it's more anonymous and openly accessible.
>a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment'
From my point of view, that's the future.
Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks.
Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience.
We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated.
It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts.
What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.
I at the end of each of my blog posts I include a link to the tweet where I announced the post. Works well for me. If Twitter dies I guess I'll have to swap them out at some point.
Alternatively, you could use something like a Discus embed for comments but I didn't want to have one more thing to manage.
A nice addition would be having account, and being able to like it. Likes are not public, but instead combine to show you things other people liked as well. Since they are not public, hopefully that will discourage gaming it.
Readit News
But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.
I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.
I prefer Mark Twain's “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the personal websites are coming back.
Those were cool because only specific type of people were able to build websites, then the code free services for sharing content came along and everybody got online presence but because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium. The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't think we have found it just yet!
That has its own history
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
I wonder how soon people will start to collaboratively train ML models for curation, by their acts if curation, much like spam filters are trained today.
There are countless healthy and active blogs that you can read via RSS. There are great RSS reader apps.
For us technically-minded folks we need to keep being proactive about helping people read the web via RSS, improving discovery, and continually making RSS a first-class option on sites we build.
I also agree that RSS is still worth it. I am a happy subscriber to Newsblur: https://newsblur.com/
Indeed, the mess that is Twitter is giving me hope that we'll see a comeback of people self-hosting their content.
1) You can follow websites (based on blog-post titles) when there isn't a proper RSS feed.
2) You have control on how many results per feed to have listed (e.g. not having your whole feed overloaded with the posts of one source)
3) You can assign priorities to Sources and categories so that you have control what's on top of your feed.
... if someone here bothers to give it a try, I'd be happy to receive any feedback.
p.s. there's a full OPML import/export support.
It’s the opposite for me. Almost every blog exports the full text. It used to be the other way, but that was in the GReader times.
> The feed reader for people that want to be in control
I find that a questionable headline with no self-hosting option.
And it misses screenshots, I never sign up blind for anything.
However...do I get this by e-mail? In an app? Web interface? Maybe you could add some screenshots to your page :-)
Dead Comment
Anyone else notice everything old is new again? Neocities[0], Marginalia Search[1], Project Gemini[2], etc
There's many others I'm forgetting, and new ones popup on Hackernews each week.
Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days?
[0] https://neocities.org/
[1] https://www.marginalia.nu/
[2] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit.
Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.)
If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.
[0] https://spacehey.com/
Dead Comment
I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts. Maybe ActivityPub makes that possible.
The only service of which I am aware that allows for comments on RSS is https://linklonk.com/ . Are there other approaches to bring comments to RSS streams?
Maybe ooh.directory can use ActivityPub to allow commenting and voting on the entries. Comments on HN are great to check for problems with an article. That should also be true for comments about entire blogs.
The IndieWeb community is focused on this with Social Readers[1] and Webmentions[2]. The core idea is your reader also ties into your own published feed, so you can make a comment right in your reader that publishes the comment to your own feed and sends a webmention to the original article so they know about it.
Barriers to entry are still kinda high (much like making a website 25 years ago) so any adoption should lead to a better signal/noise ratio. Unless it becomes popular enough for bots to start spamming the webmentions...
[1]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader
[2]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
Ideally this system would also be integrated into browsers you you can see and write comments even when visiting a URL directly.
>In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment.
I share this view. What do you think about a concept wherein a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' with an email form? It will look like a regular comment textarea under some blogpost, but the commenting is done by email. The reaction isn't immediately visible under the blogpost (if at all) and therefor everything works humanly slow. But there's also no signup required, so it's more anonymous and openly accessible.
From my point of view, that's the future.
Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks.
Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience.
We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated.
It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts.
What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.
Alternatively, you could use something like a Discus embed for comments but I didn't want to have one more thing to manage.
Curation, combined with good categorization, is sorely needed in today's internet.
The solution of "search" (aka Google) just doesn't cut it if you want to discover the best publications in a topic area.
I hope this project takes off!
A nice addition would be having account, and being able to like it. Likes are not public, but instead combine to show you things other people liked as well. Since they are not public, hopefully that will discourage gaming it.
https://guardian.gyford.com/
https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819