The eldest among us remember the First Web, before search engines were Good Actually. They used secret magics to make sense of the chaos that was the First Web.
Site directories.
Web rings.
Home pages linking to trusted sites.
Homework and jello shooter recipes study notes.
Now that the Search Engines have fallen it is time to bring those ancient tools back, for ourselves and the youngest among us who never knew the First Web.
@randomgeek it's down at the moment, but Curlie is the modern successor to DMOZ.
Cloudhiker is fun: https://cloudhiker.net/explore
@gary_alderson @randomgeek Haha, I can't tell if you're kidding here or not, but if you aren't, then I predict you will be very disappointed with the eventual product of AI generated links!!
My recollection of webrings and manual directories was that they eventually got overswamped by the massive quantity of content. Curiously, though, now I feel like most of that same content is just so much BS that I'd be better off with a custom curated sliver of content instead. Heh.
Back in the day.... A long time ago...
There were no search engines. There was the net. And there was the web. But you had to know about something in order to get there.
Someone introduced a suite of programs called the ferrets. There was Mail ferret And, I think address ferret.
I was pretty blown away. They took a long time to run, but it was neat and it opened up things that I hadn't thought were possible.
Does anyone else remember the ferrets?
I think that they may have preceeded Gopher. But then we're talking about my memory, so who knows. π
Gopher was certainly a neat addition to our net.
@randomgeek itβs a pity that @veronicaexplains has mostly left the Fediverse*.
She started to use these kinds of techniques to avoid using web search, and after a rougher beginning, it started to work for her.
*Unfortunately, for good reasons.
@randomgeek I remember using a search engine aggregation app that did searches across Lycos, Ask, Alta-vista and the like, then post-filtered and presented the results in a single list.
Of course those were also the days of a single browser page (pre-tabs). <Sheepishly looks at current tab count>
@InstantArcade Heck I wrote myself one of those!
Had to do something to stay busy after the dot-com crash.
@enoch_exe_inc Could you check the bandwidth you grant it?
With 15-30 connections (a typical bandwidth) it should not take half an hour to open a page.
Though the pages may take as long as a regular newspaper clearnet pages when accessing them without uBlock Origin.
Though thatβs more a matter of the sad state of the clearnet π’ and not of superb performance of Freenet π
@randomgeek
@enoch_exe_inc For me it also provides fallback for my website, but additionally it brings communication tools that stay up when others fail β i.e. IRC via FLIP and Sone.
And it provides the only fully confidential communication channel I have β only with friends, but in exchange it even hides metadata: whether and when we communicated.
I really enjoyed the web back then. Nowadays, not so much.
I even had my 15 minutes of fame thanks to my personal website* - just me, giving completely free information about good places to undertake the activities I enjoyed, and how to make cheap lights to do them at night.
*fame was wholly limited to the relatively small circles my site served
@Elizafox absolutely
because we're bringing back "this site best viewed in lynx"
@randomgeek I dunno if I like that. I actually like graphics. :p
I remember using DOS and old Unix as a kid and I do not pine for those days.
Anders
Random Geek in limbo
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