What ever happened to webrings? (2015)

https://hover.blog/what-ever-happened-to-webrings/

by susam • 4 years ago

129 111 4 years ago

This article seems mostly focused on the business webrings, but what about the core idea?

I think it was probably doomed by sites not wanting outbound links, either because of pagerank, fear of loosing traffic, looking unprofessional, or the appearance of an affiliation. The inbound traffic was not worth the outbound traffic.

cragfar• 4 years ago

I could be remembering it wrong, but I'm pretty sure Google's webscraper was far superior to basically any other search engines, and that along with it's ranking algorithm killed whatever need for webrings there were. I remember having to tell Yahoo about my website and they said their bot would look at it in a couple of days.

Mountain_Skies• 4 years ago

I operated a webring for my university, eventually breaking it into separate rings for students, alumni, and fans of the sports programs. The biggest issue was people who would sign up but never would insert the required code into their page for the navigation to appear. In most cases, it didn't seem like they were trying to be freeloaders getting inbound traffic while prohibiting outbound but rather that writing HTML was still relatively new and many people were following along with tutorials, making simple substitutions for colors and adding individual links but got confused when they needed to add a big block of html table code. A few were semi-freeloading in that they insisted the inbound link be to their index.html but the ring code that enabled outbound links were hidden at the bottom of another page.

There were various scripts created for managing such issues but it didn't seem worth the hassle so I ended up letting the rings decay until eventually pulling the plug when leaving for grad school.

tommek4077• 4 years ago

I didn't even know webring.org but used quite a lot own build webrings until the mid 2000s. Probably something like this has a chance again as google does not work anymore to find multiple niche sites.

amadeuspagel• 4 years ago

The decline of an idea should not be blamed on a single service. Why did no one else make some better service for webrings?

miohtama• 4 years ago

Because search engines (Google) and centralised blogging services (WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, later Twitter, Facebook, etc.) offer better user experience and discoverability than webrings.

JohnFen3• 4 years ago

I dunno. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. don't actually provide what the web used to provide, so they certainly didn't improve anything from the early web. It's apples-and-oranges, but the apples mostly don't exist anymore. It happened as part of the shift the web made from being people-driven to being commerce-driven.

coldacid• 4 years ago

s/offer better user experience and discoverability/have better marketing and SEO/

FTFY.

PhasmaFelis• 4 years ago

Webrings died because they were made for personal homepages, and social media killed personal homepages.

shagie• 4 years ago

Looking at it and the links...

http://web.archive.org/web/20150915200650/http://dir.webring... - oh, that looks neat... but then following to its current version, it appears to be bought by some other company and then left to rot (no content there).

And then...

Or better yet, check out Hover’s very own collection of random old websites, Retro Site Ninja!

http://web.archive.org/web/20150916233518/http://retrosite.n...

That looks neat...

    curl: (6) Could not resolve host: retrosite.ninja

Oh.

genghisjahn• 4 years ago

Where was that cool site I saw yesterday? Click...nope....click...nope....click...nope...click...that's it.

Webrings were like the 8-track tape of the internet.

stavros3• 4 years ago

Google version: Where was that cool site I saw yesterday? Click... nope. Guess it's gone.

jagged-chisel• 4 years ago

Except 8-tracks didn’t have bookmarks

stavros3• 4 years ago

I really like webrings, I wonder why they aren't as popular any more. I wonder if I should create something that lets you make your own webrings, just define a list of sites, add the link, and that's it.

1337shadow2• 4 years ago

Usually those are paid for by webmasters, such as with linkfarm.net

stavros3• 4 years ago

Hm, but that's not a webring, is it? A webring links from one site to the next, but linkfarm (as I understand it) links from multiple sites to one.

hoherd2• 4 years ago

I think Awesome lists kind of fit this bill. I know it's not the same UX as a webring, but it seems like having an index view would suffice. It's more utilitarian and less experiential, but would be much easier to manage and track.

Did webrings have more features than just the list of sites, like voting and stuff? I honestly don't remember.

hoherd2• 4 years ago

After further thought, Awesome lists miss one critical thing: there's no way to navigate from the pages in the list back to the index or to other pages in the list. That's a pretty crucial feature of webrings.

patorjk• 4 years ago

I remember joining these back in the day. They were actually pretty good at driving traffic to niche sites.

I used one about 15 years ago to help promote an ASCII Art app I wrote (I'm still a member too). I just checked and the webring still exists (http://artcode.org/ascii/index.php). Many of the sites that were members are now gone, but some of them still exist. Kind of cool that it's still around, it's a nice look into the past.

wrycoder2• 4 years ago

Devault uses one on his blog pages.[0]

Actually, he wrote it himself to support static websites.[1]

Naturally.

[0] https://drewdevault.com

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring

treve• 4 years ago

indieweb has webrings: https://indieweb.org/indiewebring

dang• 4 years ago

We changed the url from http://web.archive.org/web/20150920010813/http://www.hover.c... to the current version of the original source.

Please don't post archive.org links unless there's really no alternative.

"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

c7b2• 4 years ago

A webring was prided on offering a free and decentralized experience.

Sounds great, and I imagine they were useful for the 90's web to jump from one Star Wars fansite to the next (which would have been much harder to find otherwise), but frankly, I didn't feel a great desire to see them now. I guess that mode of browsing is simply not how I use the web nowadays, nor I imagine many other people.

Melatonic• 4 years ago

Maybe this is the direction we need to go in, however. Most people now do not type in URL's and a search engine becomes their single point of knowledge or discovery (or social media). Do we really want that much power in a single entity?

What we might need are modern web rings - an easy to setup software that is plug in play for anyone who sets up a simple site - and that then can be configured to point to other sites. Maybe with a universal login for that "ring"

c7b2• 4 years ago

I agree, I also often think that the web should become more decentralized again, but the thing is, it also needs to be fun to use. Mastodon is an interesting experiment in that regard.

Maybe one could argue that link aggregators like HN are sort of a spiritual successor to the webring concept? You also go from one interesting site to the next, but you also have a social aspect, which makes it a lot more fun. The centralization is still quite strong, though. Just wondering whether you could keep the social element but make it more of a 'pull' thing, like webrings were, than a 'push' from a central site like HN.

8note• 4 years ago

Reddit already has this -- make yourself a subreddit and post links you like to it

rr888• 4 years ago

I always thought Google PageRank would penalize you for a webring as its often from an unrelated site so could count as a spam link.

worldofmatthew• 4 years ago

Use nofollow?

adventured• 4 years ago

What happened to them?

Webrings were a form of social network and modern centralized social networks with media capabilities ate them.

MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Digg, Reddit and all the rest - they depopulated webrings, which drastically reduced the value in the network rings.

People have N time in the day to post content. They chose the easier, heavily networked publishing systems to use.

nonrandomstring• 4 years ago

I read;

If the words GeoCities, Excite or Alta Vista mean anything to you, then chances are that the word ‘webring’ triggers a sudden pang of nostalgia.

but cannot help hear a voice from 2032, saying;

  "If the words Like, Follow, and Tweet mean anything to you, then
   chances are that the words "Social Media" triggers a sudden pang of
   nostalgia."

If nostalgia is a permanent feature of the Internet, so is the paroch...{EDIT} ear-shredding squee of fanbois.

the_doctah• 4 years ago

If nostalgia is a permanent feature of the Internet, so is the insufferable parochialism of the present.

I feel confident you could have used a more accurate word that doesn't make it sound like you're trying to flex your vocabulary. HN in a nutshell I suppose.

kergonath• 4 years ago

a more accurate word

How do you know the OP’s thoughts to believe you have a more accurate word to convey them?

Parochial perfectly conveys the combination of ignorance, narrow perspective and pettiness. What would you use with the same meaning?

LAC-Tech7• 4 years ago

Do you want to have a go at re-wording it?

I'm assuming "parochialism" is what you have an issue with, but I'm struggling to think of what else sounds better and conveys the same meaning.

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/parochial <--- those are all pretty crap

LAC-Tech7• 4 years ago

You know you're getting older when people start getting nostalgic for things you still think of as new.

sumnole• 4 years ago

If you miss GeoCities, you can get your modern fix through NeoCities:

https://neocities.org/

a-dub• 4 years ago

was just recently wondering what happened to blogrolls...

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

Webrings were never meant to be in place of search. Search existed in 1994, in various crappy ways. I searched for things, and I occasionally click webrings links. Webring is more like an ad exchange for mostly non-profit personal sites.

squarefoot• 4 years ago

This. Webrings today would help to find only other sites relevant to the 1st one, something that sponsored results in search engines returned pages made harder with time. Not only they can coexist with search engines, they would actually improve them, although not in the way Google et al. would like.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

See also: Blog Rolls (which I think are better).

Jyaif• 4 years ago

Just the other day I was talking about webrings and how some discord servers are emulating this by having "partnered communities".

hammock• 4 years ago

Ok for those a little younger who don’t remember webrings- remember stumbleupon?

EamonnMR• 4 years ago

I found so much cool stuff on StumbleUpon.

ehecatl42• 4 years ago

Yes. And, SixDegrees, Delicio.us Digg, early Reddit where folk would just post links they thought interesting to their own profile (who uses reddit that way now? Can one, even?); folksonomies and social book-marking.

Maybe there's a swing back in that direction with the "fediverse"?

rendall• 4 years ago

"...when finding things online was a treasure hunt rather than a simple search query."

I remember my first moments on the web, 1995 or 1996. There was a website, it might have even been disinfo.org, and it had really weird shenanigans like forums for people who (believe they) had been kidnapped by UFOs. I thought it was great! But the second time I logged in, I couldn't find it. So I wrote a nice email to Yahoo asking if they had removed it from their listings, and somebody at Yahoo responded almost immediately with the URL, like this was a normal thing to do. I think about that sometimes, when thinking about the early days of the web.

buzzert• 4 years ago

They still exist, and are really fun! I'm part of a community that has a webring and a Mastodon instance: https://webring.xxiivv.com/

avidphantasm• 4 years ago

Nice article about webrings, which I had forgotten about. Thank you. One quibble: “Websites were difficult to build” — I have to disagree. Websites were far far easier to build then.

brigandish2• 4 years ago

If anything, the tools that were built to deal with problems extant at the time only allowed the building of more complicated websites - or, all too often, not more complicated websites but built in more complicated ways.

jxf2• 4 years ago

See: Microsoft Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc.

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

Indeed. If it wasn’t impossible, it was probably easy. Because there was just so little to it back then.

The good news is that it’s just as easy today to make those simple websites.

gog• 4 years ago

They are still easy to build if you want to build the same site you would be building back then.

blooalien• 4 years ago

In some ways they're even easier to build than they were back then if you use the right tools. Some static website generators these days are ridiculously simple to get started with and can get you rolling pretty darn fast with a quite professional looking and easy to self-host web site (or VPS host, or other site hosting method). The hard part of it all is writing content folks will want to read. Best if folks do what they did back then and write content about things you're passionate about. If it excites you to write about it, that excitement will often be "contagious" to others of similar mindset and interests.

notatoad• 4 years ago

Eh, i guess if you had a basic level of ability and knowledge of not just HTML, but also the ability to upload files over FTP, register a domain, set up the DNS records to point your domain to your host.

but most of the people building wix or squarespace (or whatever all the youtuber and podcasters are promoting this week), they don't have that knowledge and don't necessarily want to learn it. easier for you doesn't mean easier for everybody.

Zak• 4 years ago

Geocities and the like had ways to put up a website without much expertise by the late 1990s.

Many ISPs included personal web hosting with their internet access service at the time as well, which usually did require a slightly higher level of knowledge, but not that high. Netscape had a point and click page editor by 1997.

pm24601• 4 years ago

true! in part the expectation for what was a quality webpage was lower. remember how crude the yahoo home page was!

jxf2• 4 years ago

Websites were simpler to build. They were not necessarily easier to build or maintain.

dopidopHN• 4 years ago

The static aspect of most page and the low expectation / forgiving users made it easier for hobby site.

LAC-Tech7• 4 years ago

How were they simpler?

ReactiveJelly2• 4 years ago

I have to disagree. Using the dev tools in Firefox and Chromium is way easier than fiddling in Notepad and constantly reloading.

bnralt• 4 years ago

Yeah, I remember ~2000 or so it seemed like a lot of non-techie people were creating their own personal site on Geocities/Angelfire/etc. In high schools lots of teenagers (again, including non-techie folk) had their own web pages.

What was nice is that more thought went into it, since it was basically a blank canvas. There also was a focus on quality over quantity - your website was something you continually grew and improved. Modern content is something you churn out and forget about immediately after.

But as easier options became available, those sites disappeared. First blogs came along, which were more structured. And modern social media is even more structured as well. We went from a single blank canvas you could spend hours tinkering with to a coloring book page you're given for sixty seconds before it gets thrown away and you're given the next one.

anjel• 4 years ago

For those dearly departed websites, a fine extension exists to easily pass a 404 URL to archive.org, painlessly loading the backed up site in 2 clicks of a mouse... Available for Chrome Edge Firefox and Safari https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

aimor• 4 years ago

Webrings were ok, but what I really miss was people just having a page of links to other websites they liked. This was the feature that drove most of my web browsing.

Today the web doesn't feel like a web, it feels like there's a few large social media hubs that point to every other website, and those sites only point one of two places: to themselves or to an Amazon affiliate link. Years ago I remember getting frustrated on some news site because all their hyperlinks just linked to other barely-relevant articles on their website. I didn't understand at the time what they were doing.

If you have a personal website, consider adding a page with links to your favorite sites. Search engines just don't capture that type of browsing.

JohnFen3• 4 years ago

So much awesome stuff was lost from those days, and was never replaced.

LAC-Tech7• 4 years ago

Don't be a doomer. We have the technology.

amatecha2• 4 years ago

I do this! I've categorized them, and for many of them I even describe them! http://matecha.net/links/ (also note the http, to allow older systems to connect. https also supported of course)

creamynebula• 4 years ago

Thank you! I got interested in using scuttlebutt, I would like to get involved in a social network not used by many; was sad to see that it isn't maintained anymore, so probably not safe.

kristopolous2• 4 years ago

Tor sites do all of this still.

I don't advocate for their content but the way they've built things is pretty great.

I've described it as "the 1998 web with better cgi scripts".

Also search engines like marginalia (https://search.marginalia.nu) and teclis (https://teclis.com/) are nice - they essentially filter out pages with advertisements and trackers which is a pretty brilliant way to defeat SEO farms and other low quality content with ulterior motives.

To see their effectiveness give it a challenge. Try queries like "how to lose weight" or heck, "lasagna recipe".

To demonstrate, I just took the time to make two videos for "lasagna recipe" with the network tab of chrome's inspector window open:

google's first result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntC5ZcgxyD4

teclis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GULoL8o6NDA

Along with recipe sites, there's recently been a crop of similar looking tech help sites that basically give w3schools level answers with a bunch of rotating ads based on the hypothesis that users will look at the content, then focus on their work for the next hour or two, keeping the tab open because that's just the common pattern while the ad rotations go on the page.

As far as serving ads go, programming and recipe sites exhibit similar usage patterns. Similar to recipe sites, the answers you came for are interleaved with ads in the hope that people drag their cursor over the banner ad while selecting text from the site or at least keep that part in the viewport open for the duration of the activity. What a lovely feature!

Search has to be driven by axioms of values and purpose because different intents yield different results. There is no silver bullet.

For example, google, bing and yandex's goals are pretty antithetical to mine unless I'm actively trying to buy something. On google, I came for a lasagna recipe and someone tried to sell me car parts and a home mortgage which is fine. Those engines are just a poorly chosen tool for that job.

wan_ala• 4 years ago

Tor sites do all of this still. I like browing onion sites from time to time, typically personal sites. It is resemblant of the wild west days of the web, except most onion sites are for drugs.

Gigachad• 4 years ago

The novelty of random blogs and info pages is worn out for people

noyesno• 4 years ago

Those were called "Blogroll".

pmlnr• 4 years ago

That was the later term, once "blog" became a thing :)

is_true• 4 years ago

IMO, Google started the decay of the web.

People started to think about linking as a way of "losing" Pagerank.

Stuffing keywords.

And the worst of all, content length. People started writing long articles to keep the Search God happy, most of the times with little added value and a diluted information density, making readers lose time to keep the Gods happy.

Then social networks took over and it was even worse. Most people ditched their own sites or never started one, a friend who is a photographer lost his FB/Instagram accounts a couple of days ago and now understands what I was talking about when I told him he should have some content in a domain he controls.

Instagram doesn't even allow more than one link.

Jorengarenar• 4 years ago

At some point I had to create a database: [link redacted]

rambambram2• 4 years ago

I really like these lists, especially this long. Since I saw something interesting in the first couple of links/descriptions, I bookmarked it and will go through it soon. For me, this is what the internet was meant for. I'm also collecting interesting links to share publicly on my website(s), in a sort of webring/blogroll kinda way.

rambambram2• 4 years ago

Isn't this called a blogroll, this list of links? In my company's website software, we built a module that combines webrings with blogrolls. We just call it 'shared links'. It's plain simple, because it's the most stupid basic thing one can do with the web: have links to other interesting content. And it's also a curated list of links. Real human recommendations.

samstave• 4 years ago

They were afraid, and things got hot, what we normally call in the industry; BBQ Chicken Webrings.

amatecha2• 4 years ago

There are a few active webrings I'm aware of, and their participants are pretty active and use them as a way to explore a slice of the web

https://fediring.net/

https://ring.fediverse.radio/

https://webring.xxiivv.com/

Further, one acquaintance has built a search engine specifically for web rings: https://github.com/cblgh/lieu

jrnichols• 4 years ago

they were also not meant to scale. if something happens to the Ringmaster, that was it. I remember a couple rings falling apart years ago because of that.

thomond• 4 years ago

There's something seedy about the term webring I just can't identify.

thewebcount2• 4 years ago

Yes, exactly! I remember it being something junky that people added to their site because they were desperate for traffic. I don’t recall ever seeing a web ring with anything interesting or useful in it beyond the page I started on because I knew that site had something I’d like on it before opening my browser.

ReactiveJelly2• 4 years ago

The technology for webrings was owned and managed by webring.org
A webring offered a free and decentralized experience

Which is it lol? Decentralized or owned and managed by a single domain?

casualwriter• 4 years ago

Webring was great. Missing it like missing old good day which everything is fresh and good. Now have to dig in junk for good thing, rarely fresh.

phforms• 4 years ago

I believe webrings could still be great discoverability and serendipity tools for smaller communities today. They could provide a curative answer to the failure of qualitative selection in search engines and a (small but significant) counterbalance to the corporate attention-sinks that dominate the modern web.

Of course this depends on trustworthy people who are willing to take on the effort to become a “ringmaster” of their community and approve new entries. There could even be webrings that connect great related webrings, forming a decentralized network of rings – a web of value and meaning rather than commerce and data aggregation.

But I guess our browsing habits have changed too much and it has become rare that we discover great websites outside of the realm of anonymous content-machines. Most people wouldn’t even see any of those rings or would ignore them and instead google for similar websites, even if they find only a bunch of crap between ads.

lapcat• 4 years ago

I unknowingly proposed something similar recently — an alliance of Mac indie developers forming an alliance to link to each other's web sites — and everyone said "Isn't that a webring?"

davidpfarrell2• 4 years ago

As a co-founder of Starseed, owner of WebRing after Sage Weil, I wish I had more time to chime in on all of this. I will say the OP gets this wrong:

Webring.org was purchased by an investment firm in 1997

We were not an investment firm - We were a scrappy startup that was housed in the same city as Sage and got to know him (as well as many other techies in the community) and had the opportunity to purchase WebRing from him at a time when he was ready pursue other interests.

Webring.com gets it more correct:

In 1997, Weil sold WebRing to Starseed, Inc.

WebRing was awesome for its time - I personally did a lot to speed up the system that we purchased from Sage to help it keep scaling to the point where we could get acquired.

Tim Killeen, eventual owner of WebRing after Yahoo left it to die, did some great additions to the technology to help keep it relevant for several more years.

There's been a lot of discussions of small personal sites coming back into vogue recently - This gives me hope that something like WebRing could find value in the community again.

/side note:

I was onsite at GeoCities working to integrate WebRing into their system.

Literally, on my final day onsite and the when were to demo the integration, the company all-hands announcing the sale to Yahoo happened.

Exciting times !

gsempe• 4 years ago

Who is owning the WebRing brand now? I would be happy to discuss ways to bring it back in the modern web!

davidpfarrell2• 4 years ago

All of the servers (co-located: so old school amiright!?) are gone and domain names have been relinquished.

I'm honestly not sure why the current webring.com has a history section on it since the site doesn't appear to anything else useful.

Just occurred to me that, if you were designing this today, you wouldn't choose "webring.com" ...

It would be Ringz.io, or wbr.ng or Loop.ly or somesuch :)

wozname• 4 years ago

My Dad runs a website for his Meccano hobby, and as far as I know their webring is still active: http://nzfmm.co.nz/ https://meccano.link/

I was definitely surprised to see an active web ring.

Brajeshwar• 4 years ago

Ah! I was part of them - the Webrings. One of the most key/vivid memory was being on Macromedia's site of the day, and a whole swarm of links coming in. Then many other "CSS Site of the Day" followed. The night I got the email of being accepted into 9Rules[1] was one of those celebratory events.

Not on my personal website, but I did started some sorta linking/collecting/diary-ing thingy at our family website https://notes.oinam.com (very rough around the edges, lots of broken links, yet to even have a pattern to start tidying up).

1. https://9rules.com

sinenomine• 4 years ago

Webrings are very much alive, see for yourself:

https://webring.xxiivv.com/

https://fediring.net

https://getimiskon.neocities.org/gr/lainring.html

thewebcount2• 4 years ago

I’m really surprised by the love of web rings shown here. Even in the late 90s they felt cheesy, and by the early 2000s seemed like most of them were prey to scams. There must have been some sort of typo-squatting thing going on because I recall clicking some web ring links and then suddenly you’d get to a site that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. In fact, the way I remember it, usually after 1 to 2 links in the ring, you were off in left field at something completely unrelated. Maybe I was just unlucky? I do remember getting spammed with requests to add my site to many web rings, all of which seemed very poorly run. Maybe it had something to do with the particular topics I had on my site? I don’t really know.

jerglingu• 4 years ago

"join my webring" was something of a meme before memes were a thing

jefftk• 4 years ago

I have openring on my blog and am very happy with it. Each of my posts now has a few links at the bottom to recent posts on blogs I follow. https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring/

bullen2• 4 years ago

Back in the late nineties there was a Swedish web company called speedway-da.se or something like that (digital army) that linked to a site they made for their friends that grouped their personal blogs.

It was something short like bla404.something can't remember so I can't search archive for it either... but since speedway isn't there I think this was before archive existed.

Anyhow the point is; those "blogs" or home made diaries where incredible, pseudonymous before people realized that what you say on the internet can be stored forever so people really REALLY said the truth and I couldn't stop reading.

About relationships, funny tidbits and absurdities of life all mixed in the most honest and open communication I have ever witnessed, all made from scratch (html and pictures only at that time no .css an very little to no .js) AND designed from scratch AND self hosted!

To go back there you need some sort of cryptographic solution that ensures you can hide forever but even then the sort of information you are prepared to share now is not the same as back then when nobody knew/understood what privacy problems an indefinitely copyable/storable/shareable world brings.

It's lost in time, like tears in rain.

ridgered4• 4 years ago

Anyhow the point is; those "blogs" or home made diaries where incredible, pseudonymous before people realized that what you say on the internet can be stored forever so people really REALLY said the truth and I couldn't stop reading.

Odd but I felt like people were more aware during that era that what you said might never go away, but were perhaps emboldened by the default pseudonymous state of the web at the time. I remember being taught in school to use no personal information when setting up accounts and my classmates largely following that doctrine. Facebook's real name policy seemed bizarre to me but the world had kind of changed by then.

bullen2• 4 years ago

I think the problem is we need to move into the low power digital realm to survive, because all physical low hanging fruits have been picked.

So that means the real value has to move into the digital world which is fragile = the hardware breaks and since it's connected you can get hacked without recourse!

Back then digital was just for fun, now it's serious. I don't know where you grew up and which level of paranoia the people around you had?

That said, you should probably be more scared about the future, than the past; only one way around it: Take responsability and prepare:

  - Own your connection.
  - Own your hardware.
  - Own your software.
  - Own your time.

And here "own" is more "know", "be able to repair" and "have the right to use", than "be rich in money"; although without money you can't do anything.

But a simple Raspberry 4 on battery backup (on the fiber router too) with dynamic DNS; can actually feed you, maybe not today but very soon when AWS and co. start raising prices! It's not a question of if, but when.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

Modula-2 webrings still exists, http://www.modulaware.com/m2wr/

deafpolygon• 4 years ago

Then social media came along and put the final nail in its coffin.

What ever happened to webrings? (2015)

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