Stumbled into a webring

Ok, so maybe the old, small web has some juice left in it.

Here I am writing a short essay about why I’m building a memex in 2023, and the enshittification of search engines made it very hard to find the popular essay that inspired me to start a private social network in the pandemic. I know I bookmarked it, I vaguely remember the name of the (seemingly awesome) person that wrote it, but mostly the colors not the words of his name. Searching confronted me with the ongoing enshittification of search at the moment – even Duck Duck Go was brimming with chum and generative clickbait-feeling stuff about boosting brand engagement. I almost gave up but the last result on the page of one search, as I was clicking away from it, had a name on it that tripped a sub-verbal set of associations that made me click through, and I found myself looking at this:

Not only was it the right link, it was on a… regular personal website but it looked basically like what I thought all websites should look like 20 years ago (and tbh still do), built with thing I currently prefer to make websites with.

And, uhh, it’s part of a…webring? The Public Interest Tech Webring?

It’s moments like these that remind me that maybe my first thought when I find little patches of thriving native plants in the corners of Online monoculture shouldn’t be “how long until this disappears?” and instead just enjoy the clicking.

Like, ok I just went back to those links turns out I’m looking at the blog of one of the bigger proponents of modern webrings!

This is like the time I started writing about why I was making a digital garden and ended up discovering the gemini protocol » How This Memex Started