Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web

by susam • 4 months ago

370 89 4 months ago

susam18• 4 months ago

Hello HN!

This tool is inspired by Kagi Small Web (recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410542). A common concern raised here is that Kagi Small Web currently accepts only blogs, comics and YouTube channels. It does not accept arbitrary small websites. That limitation motivated me to build Wander.

Wander is fully decentralised. Anyone can host it on their own website. It consists of just two files: an `index.html` for the Wander console and a `wander.js` where you link to other Wander consoles. It is a bit like a webring, but more flexible. Each console can link to any number of sites and other consoles.

There is no server-side code, no database, nothing to install. If you have a website, you can set it up by uploading just two files. In fact, you can host it on GitHub Pages or Codeberg Pages too.

If you like the idea, please join the network. I would love to see it grow.

More details about how it works and how to set it up here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#readme

hamdingers• 4 months ago

This is so delightful! I'll be deploying this and sharing a link on the issue.

One issue I see: If I get you to include a link to my console but I don't link to any others, I can trap wanderers within my recommendations until they refresh.

If that's not desirable, it could be avoided by having the client keep a running list of all the consoles it has discovered this session and choosing from that list at random.

susam18• 4 months ago

Glad you like it. Yes, you are right. This is something I realised too initially as a natural consequence of being the only participant in the console network at the beginning. Keeping a list of discovered consoles is exactly what I was thinking too. I built this tool rather quickly as a proof-of-concept while taking a break from another activity, so I couldn't quite find the time to implement this solution. But I might implement it in the next update. Thank you for taking a close look at this project!

susam18• 4 months ago

If that's not desirable, it could be avoided by having the client keep a running list of all the consoles it has discovered this session and choosing from that list at random.

Implemented in <https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/commit/f4d95fa>. Thanks again for the discussion!

pibaker3• 4 months ago

This tool is inspired by Kagi Small Web

To me the way Kagi curates its small web directory always feel contradictory to the spirit of independent web publishing because it seems like you have to submit entries through GitHub — a highly centralized platform owned by one of the largest tech companies.

kudos to you for figuring out a decentralized solution.

refsab• 4 months ago

Good point. Would be less irritating if they hosted on codeberg.

daigoro• 4 months ago

This is delightful! I found a bunch of interesting sites in just a few minutes. I appreciate your simple and decentralized approach.

I'm going to set this up on my website as a replacement for my boring blogroll list.

Incidentally, I made something similar (also called Wander!) that uses browser bookmarks as a source of links. It's a browser extension called "Wander your bookmarks" and helps you wander through sites you bookmarked in the past. In addition to jumping you to a random bookmark, you can also filter your bookmarks by keyword and jump from that shortened list. Check it out here: http://kmshiva.com/projects/wander.html .

bovermyer2• 4 months ago

Oh, that's neat. I think to really understand it though I'll have to explore it and experiment with hosting my own Console.

pbronez• 4 months ago

Cool idea - it’s like a recommended set of links, but integrated into an interface like stumble upon or Kagi’s small web browser

deanebarker• 4 months ago

Love this, but I need it to allow me to break the frame. I found some neat sites, but I need a button to open them in a new tab, frame-free, if I want to.

mzajc• 4 months ago

Firefox has a neat feature for this; if you right click an iframe, it'll have a "This Frame" menu with options including "Open Frame in New Tab".

susam18• 4 months ago

Thank you for taking a look at this project. I'm glad you liked it.

You make a fair point. I put this together in about 1.5 hours in the early hours of the morning while taking a break from other academic work, so it is not as polished as it could be. Adding an 'Open' button to launch a link in a new tab sounds like a useful feature. I will consider this for the next update. Thank you for the feedback!

susam18• 4 months ago

Hello @deanebarker, This was implemented in <https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/commit/f952fe4>. If you visit <https://susam.net/wander/> now, you should see an 'Open' button that opens the recommended website in a new tab. Thank you for the great suggestion!

moebrowne• 4 months ago

It includes only 17 URLs: https://susam.net/wander/wander.js

susam18• 4 months ago

17 + 11 URLs from https://dahlstrand.net/wander/wander.js + 26 URLs from https://www.siddharthagolu.com/wander/wander.js that I link to from the above link. So 54 URLs so far.

The number of URLs grow as more people add this tool to their website and add each other as neighbours. The tool is capable of discovering neighbouring consoles and showing URLs from there.

Balinares• 4 months ago

Did we just reinvent webrings 25 years later? :)

(Not a diss. Webrings were cool.)

warkdarrior• 4 months ago

This will get really fun when influencers get a hold of the idea and start connecting themselves into the Wander community.

weedhopper• 4 months ago

Awesome it’s hosted on codeberg too

Babkock• 4 months ago

Looks cool. Good job!

surgical_fire• 4 months ago

This is actually pretty cool. Once I have my own personal webpage, I may even add this tool to it.

It is a project I keep postponing lol

dgb232• 4 months ago

I want to like it, but I don't fully understand why one wouldn't just put a bunch of links on a /wander page and maybe randomize the order?

dreko2• 4 months ago

Because the discovery is transitive. When you wander, it fetches another console's wander.js and picks from their pages, so you're not just exploring one person's list, you're hopping across a graph of curated lists. A static link page can't necessarily do that.

susam18• 4 months ago

What you are describing sounds a bit like a blogroll, which many of us do indeed maintain. Mine is here, by the way: https://susam.net/roll.html

However, Wander is meant to be a bit like StumbleUpon, but without requiring a centralised service that everyone must go through. One limitation of a blogroll is that it does not provide a consistent way to discover recommendations recursively. For example, I might visit your website A, which recommends website B. I might then visit B, but B may not have any recommendations at all.

Every Wander instance, on the other hand, has a defined list of recommendations. It also links to the /wander pages of its neighbouring sites. If you visit the /wander page of website A, the tool can discover its neighbours (B, C, etc.), then the neighbours of those neighbours and so on. It can fetch recommended links from them and present the links within the same console.

Additionally, the tool provides a way to leave the current console and move to a neighbour's console if the visitor wants to continue browsing from there.

dgb232• 4 months ago

OK I think I get it. It's fundamentally more about the streamlined experience. I played a bit with it and it _felt_ special. So my initial reaction might have been reductive.

desireco42• 4 months ago

Ahhh... this is like my OneRandomSite.com from... 2006 or so... nice.

I think we need things like this. To be reintroduced over and over.

punknight2• 4 months ago

I love this as a concept. The wander button is great, but it still needs some curating to decide what pages you like, and getting to the actual content. I guess I'd like to know the workflow moving forward? Just re-download the repo every couple weeks, and diff to see what new sites are on the list?

susam18• 4 months ago

Thank you for taking a look at this project. I'm glad you like the concept. I am not sure I have understood your question accurately, but let me attempt a response anyway. If I get it wrong, please feel free to correct me or ask me again.

There is no need to re-download https://codeberg.org/susam/wander every few weeks. The setup is a one-time activity. From that repository, you copy exactly two files (index.html and wander.js) and place them on your web server, preferably within a /wander/ directory. After that, you only maintain the wander.js file.

You curate your own links and choose which other Wander consoles to link to as neighbours. The contents of wander.js are entirely yours to define. There is no need to diff or compare it with the version in the repository.

In fact, if you do not care about updating or curating links often, you can leave both files untouched indefinitely. The only downside is that some links may eventually succumb to link rot, which could affect the wandering experience. So it may help to review your links occasionally and remove dead ones, but beyond that no ongoing maintenance is required.

punknight2• 4 months ago

I get that, but right now, if you traverse each "console", you end up with a list of 28 trusted "small web" links. The project grows in value if that list gets bigger over time either by you personally adding nodes or the community adding nodes. I don't really have a way of knowing if you are intending to add more links to your console (thus growing the project) or this is a one and done type of system.

dreko2• 4 months ago

This is really cool, I think the idea here is fantastic!

ab_testing• 4 months ago

So like StumbleUpon

shevy-java• 4 months ago

I don't know how useful this is, but I am getting tired of Google and co ruining the world wide web how it once was. Something has to be done. I have no idea whether this here can be of help or not but the more people think about this, the better. Otherwise the quality will continue to degrade.

bovermyer2• 4 months ago

So, is this a meta-webring, that allows for showing individual sites but also sites that show other sites?

xnorswap• 4 months ago

So is this web rings all over again?

moralestapia2• 4 months ago

It is StumbleUpon over again.

susam18• 4 months ago

There is indeed a lot of similarity with webrings and StumbleUpon but there are some differences as well. I discuss this in more detail in the project README here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#faq

worldsayshi• 4 months ago

I kind of want webrings but with federated OIDC. I.e. you can create an account at any of the sites and re-use the login on the others to leave comments/add content. This has to exist in some neat package right?

foo42• 4 months ago

I feel like activity pub was supposed to / does enable this.

Perhaps someone better informed than I could comment.

pacoWebConsult• 4 months ago

We're inventing stumbleupon from first principles.

tlavoie• 4 months ago

That... seems like a good thing!

thenthenthen• 4 months ago

Tangent but wow codeberg is not blocked by the Great Firewall?

vydd• 4 months ago

Delightful!

jna_sh2• 4 months ago

Title is wrong, isn’t it Wander?

susam18• 4 months ago

Yes, I am not sure how I managed to mess up the project name. I have emailed the moderators to ask for help in fixing it.

jna_sh2• 4 months ago

Oh I totally missed you had submitted it yourself! Thanks for a wonderful project :)

dvh• 4 months ago

Remove the iframe padding/margin on mobile.

tomhow• 4 months ago

That was me sorry! I was quickly fixing it up while a meeting was starting, and I hurriedly re-typed it rather than copying+pasting like I should always do with project names.

InexSquirrel• 4 months ago

Very cool. Reminds me of stumbleupon, which I lost many hours to back in the day.

Curated discovery is one of biggest gripes with modern platforms like youtube - discovering something truly new and outside of your normal interests is really difficult, and the same goes for the web. If you have a topic you want to explore it's fine, but finding random things you'd never have thought of yourself is much harder.

oystersareyum• 4 months ago

Stumble upon led to most of my interests in life, so happy for this

Uncle_Clark• 4 months ago

Same. Curated content narrows the scope of discovery to find meaningful things. I always look for a way to turn off that "feature." Very cool!

rando77• 4 months ago

I've thought of a service that scans new websites and GitHub repos and looks for things that don't look like anything else (using something like hdbscan for outlier detection), and creates a feed for people to follow.

cosmicgadget• 4 months ago

Seems like a perfect addition to any links page.

Would it be possible to create a list of sites with a Wander?

superkuh2• 4 months ago

It would be cool if the javascript were re-written a bit to only use standard long existing javascript features so one didn't have to run a modern corporate browser to use the "wander" functionality. It did not work in my browser even with JS enabled.

susam18• 4 months ago

Sorry to know it did not work in your browser and thank you for reporting the problem here. If someone is able to reproduce it and share details either here or at <https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/issues>, especially which JavaScript features are not working, I would be happy to update the code.

I am aware that I have used a number of relatively modern features. For example, I suspect `for ... of` might be one, and perhaps `Element.append()` (instead of `Node.appendChild()`) could also be an issue. Unfortunately, I do not have old browsers to test this reliably, so any help in identifying the exact constructs or functions causing problems would be very appreciated.

exographicskip• 4 months ago

browserstack might be a good option to test a bunch of browsers and their different versions on real devices.

Never used it personally, but might get some mileage out of the free plan before their time-based usage expires.

https://www.browserstack.com/docs/automate-self-hosted/getti...

susam18• 4 months ago

Hello @superkuh, if you happen to revisit this, could you let me know which browser and version you were using? It would help me decide how far back I should support.

superkuh2• 4 months ago

Hi susam thanks for the heads up on IRC. I'm using an ancient firefox fork from ~2015 called Palemoon 26.5. I use it because it's the best available on my computer with the good screen reader and text to speech setup. I am not a javascript developer but my JS console says

"SyntaxError: Missing ; before statement" on line 136: let consoles = window.wander.consoles

I'd bet it's that 'let' that's emcascript6. I sort of have a polyfill extension for some things from es6 but not all.

touwer• 4 months ago

love it!

thewanderer1983• 4 months ago

Have you considered including Gemini and gopher support? There is a very nice small web community there.

MarsIronPI• 4 months ago

This looks like it depends on Javascript for interactivity, which by design isn't possible on Gopher/Gemini.

montenegrohugo• 4 months ago

Really neat. Immediately added to my own small blog: https://hugo0.com/wander

cal_dent• 4 months ago

Cloudhiker.net has been doing this for a while too. Great to see more grassroot-ish attempt at expanding the web (or i guess more accurately returning it to its purpose)

collabs• 4 months ago

I love the idea. One small thing - Ran into a problem almost immediately

Nightly Can’t Open This Page

To protect your security, drkhsh.at will not allow Nightly to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window.

neuroelectron• 4 months ago

My problem is I didn't understand what this was, refreshed the page and lost what i was reading to the ether.

susam18• 4 months ago

If you are on a computer, you might be able to see the previous links that were loaded in your web browser's Developer Tools > Console. The Wander console tool writes logs there to describe what it is doing internally.

susam18• 4 months ago

The drkhsh.at website does not allow itself to be embedded in another website:

  $ curl -sSI https://drkhsh.at/ | grep -i frame
  x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN

The problem appears to be that someone in the community added this website to their console even though it wouldn't load successfully.

See also a similar discussion here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/issues/3

There is also a note in the project README requesting console owners to be mindful of this while adding links: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#caution

pibaker3• 4 months ago

I hope platforms like these find a way to attract people outside tech circles. I looked at around a dozen recommended sites and only two of them isn't the personal website of someone who works in tech and writes mostly about tech, which gets boring rather quickly.

There is a world of non-tech bloggers writing stuffs about history, culture and nature who would likely never learn about this project simply because they are not in the right social spaces. I hope there is a way to have them in the ecosystem too.

erxam• 4 months ago

It doesn't seem very hard to implement in your own site, so it might gain some traction? It's not super-complex, I understand it is some sort of interconnected spin on webrings, which are still somewhat popular among small websites.

If anybody wants to find truly random small websites, I recommend using Wiby (search engine). It has some neat stuff.

pibaker3• 4 months ago

It doesn't seem very hard to implement in your own site

Depends on how technically sophisticated the author is. Many of the blogs I was thinking about were not written by people familiar with web stuffs. They are hosted on managed hosting services like wordpress.com and blogspot, or on hosting providers with streamlined services that require no technical skills to use. Setting up this tool may very well be beyond what the authors are comfortable with or capable of.

prox3• 4 months ago

There is also https://marginalia-search.com/

It has indexed lots of different websites categories

SilverElfin• 4 months ago

I get an infinite loop of checking my connection and the page reloading, making it difficult to navigate back. Is this some kind of scammy site?

rcakebread• 4 months ago

https://gist.github.com/ryankearney/4146814

tannerc• 4 months ago

Wow this is amazing! The experience and resulting websites are very refreshing. I feel inspired.

Throwback to the StumbleUpon days.

anonzzzies• 4 months ago

This is really great! But my work day is ruined now.... Already found so many interesting things.

shynome• 4 months ago

cool,I like this

pmontra• 4 months ago

Before webrings and the very first directories and search engines, the tools for exploring the web were memory, bookmarks and the links sections of web sites.

dannyfritz07• 4 months ago

And forums and word of mouth!

steffs• 4 months ago

The StumbleUpon comparison is apt but I think what made StumbleUpon work was the social layer: you could see what your friends upvoted, and that created an implicit filter against the pure randomness. Pure random discovery is fun for a session but gets old. Would love to see something like a lightweight trust graph here where a site vouching for other sites carries weight, similar to how Webring worked but with signal about quality rather than just affiliation.

korse2• 4 months ago

This is excellent. Thank you! I've now added it to my website (after restyling the console a bit to make everything match)!

Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web

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