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You don't see many links pages anymore for a couple of reasons. The most horrible thing about the modern internet is that the biggest websites like facebook and reddit and twitter and such are run by jerks and they set the tone; these weirdos want you to stay on their one website all day long, even when there's nothing new to read, so they don't have links pages, so people aren't exposed to links pages as part of general internet culture.

(never mind for now the fact that many of the biggest sites started off as links pages and then just started screenshotting the websites they once linked to, so people would never leave the big sites)

Second thing is google started off as a search engine that boosted sites based on how many links they had pointing back to them; google got so big that people set up "link farms" which were just spam websites that linked to legit sites (and eventually to other spam sites) and then google deranked links pages in like 2005. ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ

2. Webrings! These were great. For a while every site was part of a webring. Say you ran gerbilzone.com and wanted traffic from other gerbil sites, you'd join the Gerbil Enthusiast Webring, and paste some code into your HTML and you'd have a banner that pointed to gerbilmadness.com, and visitors from thegerbilsite.net would see a link to gerbilzone and you could traverse the sites in the whole gerbil webring until you'd seen them all and looped back around to the start (hence "ring").

Webrings let people interested in a site's topic browse through lots of other sites with the same topic to see what they had to say.

Obviously once you stumble into a webring you're going to spend a few hours happily browsing the ring, and that is NO GOOD FOR SEARCH ENGINES. They want you doing searches. So Yahoo bought Webring and killed it.

3. Banner exchanges! Back in the days when ads didn't routinely spy on you, you'd see a lot of 468*60 pixel images that were links to other websites. A lot of the time, no money was changing hands to show you these banners; these were other independent website owners who'd joined a banner exchange, often all as part of a common topic just like with webrings.

When someone visited your site, they'd get a randomly-chosen banner ad for another site within the group. You'd get one credit for showing someone else's banner, and then your site's banner would be shown on another website within the group.

You might have a banner from the Gerbil Exchange group so you knew your banner was being shown to people already interested in gerbils, and then a second one from a bigger, more general-purpose group for people who don't yet know that they like gerbils.

These also worked great, but annoyed search engines, google especially, so starting in the early to mid 2000's google deranked any site using a banner exchange. By then yahoo was as dead as it is now. ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ

These technologies were intended for small websites run by ordinary folks, and money didn't really factor into it, so they were killed by yahoo and google. I argue that it's time to bring them back in modern, federated form.

Yahoo isn't a thing anymore, and federated networks resist corporate takeover, so no threat there.

Google has turned into a pay-per-click search engine, so them threatening to derank you for using these technologies isn't much of a threat anymore, so no problem.

If someone made Webring But Not By Yahoo, 1) would you sign up, and 2) given that yahoo owns the name, what's a better name?

I really want to emphasize again that technologies like banner exchanges, webrings, blogrolls and links pages didn't die off because people just stopped using them - they were, and are, a good idea and a great, low- or no-cost way for small hobby websites and communities to find each other and form connections.

They didn't fall out of favour because of changing times. They were deliberately hobbled or bought up and killed off by power-seeking corporations, because they were hard to monetize.

Seems this thread resonated with some folks, so I spent the tenner and registered a domain name. I've got some ideas about Returning To The Net that I'm starting to think might be related. Gonna probably write some modern engines for banner exchanges and webrings, maybe fire up the old reseller webhosting plan (I used to run a little web hosting company! I sold it because I wanted to focus on Improbable Island and coin-ops full time), run something that doesn't have to make money.

See, like, I've been thinking about how to destroy facebook in particular because I think it's been a net negative in the world.

The easy thing about destroying facebook is that almost everyone agrees it needs to be destroyed, but the hard thing is they wanna talk to their mates so they're still on it. Heck, I'm still on it. Often people leave and come back.

To leave facebook, you've gotta take your mates with you. And they've gotta take their mates.

The network effect that made facebook big can pretty easily be shifted into reverse gear; people started using it because other people started using it, and stopping is only hard because it's been running for a long time.

As long as people leave in little dribs and drabs here and there, we'll keep getting sucked back in. We need to move as one. So, we set a Moving Day - one a ways off, say a year or 18 months - and we spend the intervening time finding a nicer place and practicing using it.

No need to rush, let's take our time and talk about it (move slowly and mend things!) and make sure that we've got systems set up to replicate the important parts of what facebook does and that nobody gets left behind. And decide on the kind of culture we want to nurture in whatever the new place or places is or are.

It sounds bloody hard, to get all your mates to agree to a thing and to get them to get all their mates to go along with it too - but we already did it, is the thing, we did it when we *started* using facebook. Just gotta do it again but backwards this time.

@bluestarultor Oh, that's cool. I like that.

@kelbot Aye like that, but user/viewer-friendly

@cpi Awesome! Did you accept?

@ifixcoinops yes, it's on my page there

Having muted everyone I found dull, my Facebook feed is at this point 50% adverts, 40% posts from brands I've accidentally "liked", and 10% shares of things I've already seen on Twitter. And those fucking random videos. I can keep up with that checking once a day - which is very much not enough eyeball time to keep them going.

And if, when *I* write something, I put it here not there, and at most pop a link to it into Facebook... It gradually makes Facebook's user-generated content less interesting for everyone else.

@haverholm Oh man I'm not gonna try and build facebook, I'm not crazy Probably just some banner exchange/webring scripts, compelling reasons to use them, guides on how to set up your own hobby website, that kind of thing. I haven't really thought about it much yet

@ifixcoinops Right, wasn't sure if you wanted to try and match FB features to lure users over So I guess you're going to advocate plain, lo-fi HTML/CSS instead?

The reason I wondered about one fediverse platform or other is that you mentioned turning hosting reseller. I've always been curious to see a web host offer federated services out of the box, with minimal user setup.

Sort of a hosted homesteading (host-steading?). Pay for the server space, security and maintenance, own your data. Wonder if that would catch on?

@haverholm I'm not gonna do a single heckin' thing until I've sat with the idea and the name and had a think about it! Yes, there's room and requirement for federation in there, but off the top of my head I'm inclined to say that matching facebook's feature set is a fool's errand. Everything that facebook currently does, it does *just* well enough to work *some* of the time; forums were infinitely better than fb groups, ebay/craigslist are better than fb marketplace etc

@haverholm so I'm thinking of federated stuff like peertube, mobilizon etc, but a big part of the whole "moving day" thing is to establish backup places where ppl can talk about what they need out of a fb replacement and hash out these details slowly in a chill environment, taking time to test, sit with and think about each new system in turn. I am definitely not trying to move fast

@haverholm (but I am trying to break one specific thing)

@dheadshot Oh man Bravenet was the best. I had so much Bravenet code running on my site. :D