I have made a webring! This feels important to me as I try (along with many others) to build a better web. This was a project I have been meaning to take on for some time. I did start with a basic set of links to friends in the footer of my website, but I wanted to use it more to show the web I usually interact with.
I would still like to add a little flair and some organization to the webring page, but I am trying to build this website without delivering any JavaScript, if possible. I do think the current iteration could go into a noscript block and then go and implement the immediate method I am thinking of. I did spend quite some time trying to use a force-directed graph to help me layout the Venn-diagram-like design I was originally imagining. In this case, a "Done is better than perfect" approach had to be taken.
The web has become less magical. There is a lot of evidence pointing to search engines largely getting worse and nigh unusable and the state of the web (as most people use it) has become "five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
I remember the web feeling very magical and largely found the best websites from word of mouth from people I knew. The exception to this largely was finding webcomics from the footers of webcomics I was already reading. Many of the comics I was reading would have a "My friends" section with links to their comics. Even then that felt very powerful and community-oriented, but as discovery and recommendation algorithms have dominated those five website we go to, that kind of list feels almost transgressive.
Facebook and Twitter both punish users for linking to anything that's outside their walled gardens. Instagram only allows for one external link per account (the famous "link in bio"), which has led to services like Linktree because of course we all have more than one link to share. But these are all platforms where, if you were to be banned, you would lose access to everything if it was the only place you kept your photos, videos, jokes, etc. Or the site may have a catastrophic data failure and lose everything.
The method I have appreciated for avoiding getting shut out by some billionaire has been POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site; Syndicate Elsewhere). I post blogs, art, and projects on my own site first, then share them to social media I use. Having your own website is a way to have aesthetic control over your own space as well! Almost none of the large platforms allow you to customize your page with more than a profile picture, banner, and MAYBE a highlight color. But those aeshetics matter. They help set us apart, express ourselves, and signal to others that we may be aligned just on sight.
Making a website can certainly seem daunting. You don't have to handcraft code for a website (though it is fun, and I like it myself). There are many WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get (pronounced wizzy wig)) options out there from the big corporate spaces or more indie spaces like NoBlogs or NeoCities. In an increasingly online space, having your own little place to call your own feels more and more necessary. And if you want to jump into the deep end, you could learn to code and also how to self-host a website in your own home.
We all have cool businesses, practices, hobbies, and more that we would like to share with others, so we should have control over how we present that, and how we connect to each other. So please, build your own sites. Make them how you want them (which may include making something crazily maximalist, go for it), and link to your friends and the people whose work you like most. The Indie Web is already a growing movement and there's some great things being built. The future of the web is many more small connected sites each with cool, niche, resource-rich pages.
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