The large free search engines have really gone down the drain recently.. Kagi (a paid search engine) also has a small web feature, but it's really cool that you're building something that isn't profit driven. I'll be sure to share your search engine with my friends!
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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I'd like to see ideas like this make a comeback, hopefully with some modifications this time around to protect our privacy and resist corporate exploitation.
We used to use del.icio.us and other variants to do exactly this before browsers had profiles. Back then, its primary draw was that you could take your bookmarks with you anywhere to any machine (this being before that function was baked into browsers and before web browsers could be carried in your pocket). The secondary effect was that you'd share and tag those websites with your own categories/descriptors, thus crowdsourcing a new version of the old web's link directories using Web 2.0. You could browse through symantic tag clouds to discover new things. Del.icio.us was for websites, but people were tagging and logging all of their favorite stuff and sharing it online so that like minded strangers could filled the gaps in their cultural awareness. We tagged our books with librarything. We tagged recipes with recipe thing. Audioscrobbler (later known as last.fm) logged our music listening to automate the tagging, not by direct symantic tagging, but by relational/temporal coincidence. If other people that listened to a lot of the stuff you listened to and they also listened to some other stuff you didn't, those became recommendations for you. That kind of relational algorithm would survive the slow death of Web2.0 to become the backbone of recommendation services like Spotify and probably even TikTok.
Would this also be the keystone to preventing AI from "owning everything"?
Shit tons of original work self-hosted and self-copyrighted would disallow AI (pending current and future rulings) from having ownership of the original works these websites provide.
Ive heard rumblings of an "Angelfire Reboot" or "GeoCities 2.0" emerging in recent years, and I assume that's akin to what is being discussed, yeah?
I completely forgot that last.fm was audioscrobbler. Fuck that was a long time ago
I love the sound of this, and so to start it off, I've added a very rushed together section on my personal website (and yes, absolutely a plug for my very static website).
It only points to this post's bookmark list and my personal list of high quality YouTubers, but I do want to maintain a fairly high standard of things I'd want to link there, which is why I'll leave that to a time when I'm less preoccupied.
I'm interested. I'll spend tomorrow getting something small together and add yours
i know, right?
if only there was a way to tell other people about these websites in ... some kind of an ... internet forum. and if the forum was on a nice, not too bot-infested, privacy-respecting, free, distributed and federated platform. that would be cool. one can wish...
Or a Directory of some sort....
Are WebRings still owned by something?
Webrings are very nostalgic and recently a TTRPG-blog based one got started up, so that's pretty cool! https://rootr.ing/
the side bars for each community can effectively be a webring. i'm talking about these things here:
(example is the sidebar of the /c/selfhosted@lemmy.word community)
Lemmy suffers from the same discoverability issue... so we aren't exactly the best place to tell others about obscure websites. From the start we've inherited an open-source community that leans liberal, and aside one very large recent shift that means that the community also leans mostly Democrat.
What does that have to do with discoverability? Well, one look at a front page can clue you in. (gosh I hope these screenshots shrink in size for display)
IT, Politics, and Star Trek all over the front page of my instance. Possibly worse on others. Imagine if your 80 year old great-grandma landed on this page. All she knows is what Fox News says. Instant close on the website. Not even going to open one discussion. But let's say she did open the one about the FBI director being missing:
oh my
Now let's see a competing website:
Oh, new Chinese food place! Remote work isn't working? Carrying your dog to pick up food? that's silly! 2.7 million of wine! She must have really hated that job!
So what is my point? How can Lemmy increase it's discoverability? I feel like community diversity would be the #1 concern. Well... one obvious action is to sanitize the front page of the popular instances. I'm going to assume that's a highly unpopular opinion, because then it wouldn't be Lemmy anymore. Maybe perhaps there is a different frontpage for logged out and logged in users? With politics being an opt-in for active sessions? Or maybe we should just post more cute cats.
What do you guys think? Am I completely wrong about community diversity? What changes would you make to Lemmy? It's not an easy answer.
Here is a highly relevant conversation: https://lemmy.ca/comment/21065449. This link is to one comment but also check out the OP that it is in.
Everything comes down to moderation. Lemmy's moderation abilities are extremely primitive - though notably the upcoming additional functionality to send mod reports to users on different instances than the community will help a bit. People get burnt out and can't keep up with the flood of negativity, so stop their volunteer moderating activities. Remember that Lemmy itself got started when its devs got kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic - and likewise many of its initial membership. As for the rest of us, this was the choice that we made - even if for some of us, only after Kbin died (forked into Mbin now).
PieFed offers substantially improved moderation abilities - especially those reducing the need for moderation in the first place, by placing more power into the hands of the end-user by democratization of the moderation work itself. Edit: e.g. someone wanting to avoid toxicity could leave enabled the functionality to auto-collapse or even auto-hide comments that are below a certain up-&-downvote threshold, while others who have thicker skins can disable those hand-holding options and decide for ourselves what we want to see - all without the need for moderator intervention, instead using the preferences of the community as a surrogate moderator in that case. However, PieFed as a the software platform lacks a great deal of polish in its UI compared to Lemmy (though 3rd party apps are catching up to support its feature set offered in the API).
PieFed is the only thing giving me hope for the future of the Threadiverse & Fediverse right now.
nice, not too bot-infested, privacy-respecting, free, distributed and federated platform
nice, mediocrely bot-infested, publicly readable, donation-funded, distributed and federated platform
ftfy
Weirdly I saw the title and was going to suggest making a search engine to only return sites with low traffic until I realised what this post was advertising.
i think search engines are ... tricky
i always prefer lists and indexes over search engines because search engines feels a bit like voodoo magic to me, it has unpredictable outcomes. for example, sometimes you need just the right keyword for search engines to give you meaningful results, and otherwise it will just not return anything. and that is a lot like chatgpt ... you ask it something and it might give you a meaningful response. or it might completely miss the point. when there's an actual list of communities that is small and complete, then i can go through it manually to check where it might be.
Cool website!
I think making your articles on the fediverse is better than building your blog website from scratch.
Instead of https://thisismywebsite.com/blog/
instead do https://publiclemmyinstance.com/c/myblog
This way, it better integrates with fediverse mechanics such as follow, like, comment. Also people can discover your stuff through the "all" feed, even though unlikely, maybe one day we'll get more interesting recommendation algorithms for the fediverse.
Lemmy instances are not really dependable enough for that. Setting up your own instance would be better, but there's still a discoverability problem because instances don't automatically add you to their feeds.
we need
- links from fediverse instances to other fediverse instances
- maybe tools like https://fediversemap.com/ to find fediverse instances that are physically close to you, to connect to people irl and organize irl events
- prefer to post content on already existing instances so you get better exposure
Or you create a post on your blog and post the hyperlink to it on Lemmy and maybe some other platforms. Pretty much what I have done here, except that it is not my blog in this case.
And whoever likes you website can decide to follow you on Lemmy or some other platform or to subscribe to your RSS/ATOM feed.
I agree with this.
Social media shouldn't be a requirement to express yourself online. If you start with a website, then you can choose to share on social media if you want, or not, plus anyone who wants to follow the site can subscribe to the feed without needing an account themselves.
I’m onboard with this! Great idea that only takes a little effort and big returns! The small web can stay small but some aids in discoverability is not a bad thing!
Yeah, I think something like this is good, and was a mainstay in the early 2000's personal web pages.
Another approach I like (but also dislike because of a bug preventing my site being indexed) is https://aboutideasnow.com/
Awesome!