
Show HN: Openring, a free and decentralized network of blogs - ddevault
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
======
datashaman
This article gives a good rundown of what a webring was.

[https://www.hover.com/blog/what-ever-happened-to-
webrings/](https://www.hover.com/blog/what-ever-happened-to-webrings/)

> A webring contained a list of websites that all contained a similar theme. A
> single moderator — or Ringmaster — was in charge of approving and adding
> each website to a webring. Sites participating in a webring would then place
> the ring’s navigation box at the bottom of their site, which would bring
> visitors to whichever site was next or previous in the list (depending on
> which option they selected). If a visitor was on the last site in the list
> and clicked next, the list would loop back and load the first website in the
> list, in essence forming a ring of websites.

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albertgoeswoof
If this is widely adopted, it would be quite straightforward to crawl and
graph a network of all the blogs in the ring. This would be really cool!
Search sucks for finding good blogs in my experience.

Is there anything in the output html that would make this crawling easier to
do?

RSS seems to persist because it’s on by default on almost all blogging
platforms. How can we make this into an on by default option in the main
static site generators and CMS’s?

~~~
anigbrowl
How would you go about getting that information on existing blogs? A great
many blogs have 'blogrolls' but scraping that information seems far more time-
consuming than it ought to be due to the variations in layout etc. etc.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Wordpress-based blog proprietors are likely to maintain their blogrolls using
Wordpress’s Links feature. Because this is a standard module that produces
more or less the same output across all WP blogs, it is rather easy to parse
for and scrape.

However, if this Show HN tool is for static-site generator-based blogs, then
individual bloggers may have more leeway on how to format their blogrolls.

~~~
anigbrowl
I'll give that a look. It's been a while since I checked into it but I've been
wanting to map a particular blog network for a long time so that sounds very
helpful.

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trulyrandom
It's interesting that none of the comments so far complain about the size of
the binary (13MB!). Nodejs and Electron projects get flak for this all the
time, but Go somehow gets away with it.

~~~
sethetter
I think the larger complaint about electron is the memory usage, not disk
space usage. Go may have large binaries, but they run fast and efficient.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Exactly. Who cares about 13MB disk usage in this day and age? But RAM is still
too easily exhausted on a workstation with a decent amount of multitasking
going on.

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z3t4
What do everyone use for feed reader !? My old phone used to have a built in
feed reader. And my old browser also used to have a feed reader. Looked on
Google play and there where very little to choose from. Thinking of creating
my own feed reader ... Or have "blogging" moved over to "Youtubing" and the
occasional podcast !?

~~~
mdaniel
I'm a lifetime subscriber to Feedly ([https://feedly.com](https://feedly.com))
which has behaved sanely since I joined and claims to have mobile apps but I'm
not the target audience for reading blogs on my phone.

There are also quite a few self-hosted options, the most famous one that
springs to mind is TinyTinyRSS ([https://tt-rss.org/](https://tt-rss.org/))
but I'm sure there are folks who have more experience with any alternatives
[https://alternativeto.net/software/tiny-tiny-
rss/](https://alternativeto.net/software/tiny-tiny-rss/)

~~~
blfr
Feedly is excellent. If they only added decent feed management to their
Android client (unsubscribing from a post level in particular), it would be
perfect.

~~~
pinkano
Coming soon

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aredirect
Looks nice. Is there any reason to use getopt over flag in Go?

How do you find the experience with sr.ht?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I prefer getopt because it's more succinct and more standardized.

I made sr.ht :) I can't give you an unbiased opinion, but naturally I think
it's quite nice given that I designed it explicitly to suit my needs. Check
out the marketing page for some more details:

[https://sourcehut.org](https://sourcehut.org)

~~~
samb1729
Might I ask whether you have any intention to revisit this issue?
[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht/176](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht/176)

~~~
outime
That was a disappointing response. The overall design is ok but this really
felt out of place. Hopefully he realizes that and stops blaming the
“puritanical jerks” as he himself said.

------
frenchman99
What's the use case for something like this ?

Looks a bit like what any RSS reader would provide. Or maybe it's meant to
publish links to other blogs on a separate site, which could work if the
articles have a somewhat permissive license, I guess.

~~~
vbsteven
It allows bloggers that want to keep control over their own platform and
content (read: not use Medium) to be part of a bigger network of selfhosted
blogs. Like in the good old days.

I for one hope it catches on

~~~
flunhat
How does it solve curation & search?

Edit: I'm asking because I suspect your answer is going to be "it
doesn't/that's not the point/who cares?" But people who read blogs will just
flock to the centralized services that solve curation & search quite
effectively and keep users reading. And then this centralized service will
have strong incentives to become _more_ centralized, not less, and
decentralized solutions like this one never really gain traction and become
functionally irrelevant.

~~~
onion2k
_But people who read blogs will just flock to the centralized services that
solve curation & search quite effectively and keep users reading._

I don't think that's true. People read blogs by writers they like (they go
directly to that writer) , or about topics that interest them (they follow
links from a website or social account about that topic) , or because they're
looking for a specific post about a specific thing (eg they Googled). None of
those things are best served by gathering writers on a single centralised
platform. In fact, so long as blog posts are open the reader probably doesn't
care how the posts are published. (Side note: this is the flaw in Medium. No
one want the subscribe to the Netflix of blogs. People might pay to access
their favourite writer, but not in the long term.)

Centralized blog platforms serve the _writer_. They're easy, they often have
good tools, and they have an audience, although I doubt that's actually very
useful to most writers - just having more readers without caring who they are
is pure vanity. You want relevant interested readers if your blog is going to
be effective promotion for you.

Ultimately, blog platforms are fine. Writers are a great customer base to
have. Just don't kid yourself blog platforms benefit readers. They don't.

------
clairity
ah, what's old is new again. i can't wait to get my 1999 on! =)

the subtitle is a little more informative: "A webring for static site
generators." i'm glad to see this kind of the movement toward self-
deplatforming.

i wonder how comments are both attributable and decentralized? i'm not a fan
of comments being blog posts themselves (which would be one solution to this),
as they're often "less formal" than a post and should reflect that.

~~~
SwellJoe
To be fair, lots of people (certainly I) think we took a series of wrong turns
on the information superhighway in the 2000s, toward a dangerous level of
centralization, so...maybe looking backward is good.

------
TeMPOraL
TL;DR, because comments to date suggest people don't bother reading the link:

1/ Yes, it's a blogroll.

2/ It's meant for _static_ site generators.

3/ It solves curation and search by you doing the curating yourself, in the
form of providing links to RSS feeds of the blogs you like.

Looks really nice. I think I'll hook it up to my generator.

~~~
dewey
To be fair, there's not that much information apart from the technical usage
on that link. I read it but it's not that easy to parse what it's for and what
it looks like.

~~~
inetsee
The bottom of the post includes an image that shows you exactly what it looks
like.

~~~
dewey
I got that, but if you don't know what a "webring" is I can understand how
it's not that obvious at first.

I understood what it's about after reading it in detail but I don't blame
people who have questions here. That's all I'm saying.

------
blondin
love it! i always wondered what happened to the good old blogroll

~~~
kickscondor
Interesting quote from Brad Enslen about Google's possible role in this:

> Search engines in general but Google in particular: they have warped the way
> we build websites, many websites used to have a splash or landing page
> first: “You have reached the Gates of Marlborodor” (complete with MIDI
> music) and a big Enter button. Search engines decided they didn’t like that
> so word spread to get rid of them. Rumors spread that large link pages (for
> surfing) might be considered “link farms” (and yes on SEO sites they were
> but these things eventually trickle down to little personal site webmasters
> too) so these started to be phased out. Then the worry was Blogrolls might
> be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the
> biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from
> the SERP’s (they were not removed completely just sent back to page 10 or so
> of the Google SERP’s) and traffic to Tripod and Geocities plummeted. Why?
> Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking
> out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying
> customers were complaining.

Comment is from here: [https://www.kickscondor.com/when-the-social-silos-
fall/#comm...](https://www.kickscondor.com/when-the-social-silos-
fall/#comments)

Blogrolls are returning here and there. Here's one I saw recently:
[https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2019/06/04/blogroll/](https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2019/06/04/blogroll/)

------
jammygit
I always liked the concept of webrings as a vehicle of discovery, but in
practice it was always terrible. Nobody curated what could or could not be
part of a ring so you were absolutely not finding good pages by clicking on
the “next site” link.

They have potential, but there are nuances to make them worth using

------
jefftk
I liked this, and added it to my site:
[https://www.jefftk.com/p/openring](https://www.jefftk.com/p/openring)

------
nathcd
Very cool! Since I already have my feeds sitting locally in my feed reader's
db, it'd be cool if I could just pipe that out to Openring somehow.

~~~
nathcd
Hmmm oh I suppose if I just exposed my feed reader's aggregated feed as an rss
feed over a local http server, I could just point Openring at that! I might
try to whip that together this afternoon! (I use newsboat in case anyone else
is interested in such a thing.)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Actually, I'm afraid this won't work (but I would be interested in seeing if
you could write a patch for it). Openring is designed to only use up to one
article from each feed, to keep the set of links diverse.

~~~
spacecowboy17
All RSS readers support import/export feeds in OPML format. Maybe you could
support that format as the input to Openring?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Patches welcome! I think this would be a great addition.

------
dfischer
Wow this gave me a serious flashback to late 90's websites and all the links
to other sites in a network.

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captn3m0
This should be a Jekyll plugin as well. Maybe when I get time.

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majani
Post this is right-leaning communities. Right-wing thought leaders are really
getting hammered by major platforms right now and they could really drive
adoption if they take up your product.

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masukomi
Is it just me, or is this just an automated way to steal other people's
content and put it on your blog without their permission?

> ...fetch the latest 3 articles from among your sources... Then you can
> include this file with your static site generator's normal file include
> mechanism.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
It only fetches the first 256 characters and links through to the article on
your own site... I guess if you don't like it you can send me a DMCA request.

~~~
jefftk
Seems like it's only the first 255 characters /pedant

