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Show HN: Openring, a free and decentralized network of blogs
- frenchman99 7y agoWhat'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.
- reaperducer 7y agoWhat's the use case for something like this? Looks like it takes RSS feeds and makes a blogroll. I thought most blogging platforms had that function built-in. Certainly Blogger does (ex: http://www.sloopin.com http://www.sloopin.com). Maybe this is for if you built your own blogging platform and don't have a blogroll plug-in/feature available.
- vbsteven 7y agoIt 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 7y agoHow 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.
- swsieber 7y agoIt's meant to be used and configured for individual blogs - you provide the sites you're following and it picks out articles. I'd say the selection of blogs you follow is curation enough. It's not meant for use a la medium.
- boomlinde 7y agoWhat does it mean for this to be functionally irrelevant? It fulfills its functional purpose regardless of whether it's popular or not.
- onion2k 7y agoBut 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tonyarkles 7y agoYeah, I remember webrings back in the day and absolutely miss it. The discovery aspect of it was awesome! You come across a great article through a search engine and are curious who the author likes reading. Most centralized platforms seem to recommend other authors based entirely on the topic. You’re reading a post about Rails Generators? It’ll recommend other articles about the same thing. With WebRings it was way more diverse than that. End up on an electronics page and discover all sorts of other fascinating authors doing entirely different things.
- thinkingemote 7y agoIt was also a key feature of Google reader kind of. You would be able to follow other readers and not just publishers also increasing discovery.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoYou rig it into your own blog. It's designed for use with static site generators. Check out the links on the bottom of my blog posts: https://drewdevault.com/2019/06/13/My-journey-from-MIT-to-GPL.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/06/13/My-journey-from-MIT-to-GP... They're generated by this software.
- frenchman99 7y agoOh, OK, thanks for the example. That's nice !
- pvg 7y agoI've never been able to find an answer to this I could make sense of, even back when 'blogrolls' and 'webrings' were actually in popular use.
- majani 7y agoIt's good for people with content that doesn't align with the values of employees of major platforms e.g right wing publishers, the porn publishers of Tumblr etc. Such people are always at risk of deplatforming and it's nice for their content to be spread out all over the web to prevent that risk.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoTL;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 7y agoTo 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 7y agoThe bottom of the post includes an image that shows you exactly what it looks like.
- dewey 7y agoI 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.
- clairity 7y agoah, 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.
- jeena 7y agoWe're doing this in the IndieWeb community, an example: https://jeena.net/comments/1045 https://jeena.net/comments/1045 The background technology: https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention The rather unsuccessful try to do a indiewebring: https://indieweb.org/indiewebring https://indieweb.org/indiewebring
- SwellJoe 7y agoTo 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.
- aredirect 7y agoLooks nice. Is there any reason to use getopt over flag in Go? How do you find the experience with sr.ht?
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoI 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 7y agoMight 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
- saagarjha 7y agoIsn't that what the issue says he will do?
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoI stated my intentions on the ticket. The puritanical (not to mention sexist) complaints that you can see the knees of an alledgedly "high school" girl on an obscure corner of the legacy site is not something I have a lot of patience for. This ticket is really a thinly veiled hatred of anything "anime". Eventually the page will likely go away in the due course of development of the service, but I'm not in any rush to appease puritanical jerks who make a moral appeal to hide their distaste for anything Japanese. These people are not uncommon, you get pretty good at recognizing them.
- misterdoubt 7y agoOoh no one tell them about the terrifying hybrid feline/invertebrate that lurks on a different git hosting platform. O, the unprofessionalism!
- nathcd 7y agoVery 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 7y agoHmmm 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 7y agoActually, 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.
- nathcd 7y agoThat makes sense. Sure, I'd definitely be up for trying to write a patch for it. I'll pull down the repo this evening!
- spacecowboy17 7y agoAll RSS readers support import/export feeds in OPML format. Maybe you could support that format as the input to Openring?
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoPatches welcome! I think this would be a great addition.
- z3t4 7y agoWhat 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 !?
- dsr_ 7y agoI'm quite partial to TinyRSS, available at tt-rss.org.
- mdaniel 7y agoI'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/
- meerita 7y agoI'm using also Feedly and I am a happy user. It feels so good to read blogs, much rewarding than social networks.
- blfr 7y agoFeedly 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 7y agoComing soon
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- blondin 7y agolove it! i always wondered what happened to the good old blogroll
- kickscondor 7y agoInteresting 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/#comments https://www.kickscondor.com/when-the-social-silos-fall/#comm... 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/
- masukomi 7y agoIs 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.
- trulyrandom 7y agoIt'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.
- apsdsm 7y agoI imagine because go compiles to an actual native binary, whilst electron wraps a browser and a chunk of JavaScript in a zip file. You can’t really say “go gets away with it” as though these languages are doing the same thing.
- trulyrandom 7y agoYou're right. My observation was just that the discussions often don't go much deeper than "look at this big binary", so I was surprised to find none of that here.
- samb1729 7y agoI can't say I've personally ever seen binary size explicitly called out in an Electron slating thread. It's usually memory usage on a typical 8-16GB laptop, or battery drain in the cases of frivolous animated bells and whistles. That's just my anecdata
- yorwba 7y agoThe next time you notice a particular clichéd complaint missing from a thread, it might be better to not comment on its absence unless you actually want to have the same discussion all over again.
- sethetter 7y agoI 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 7y ago
- albertgoeswoof 7y agoIf 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 7y agoHow 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 7y agoWordpress-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 7y agoI'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.
- dosy 7y agoWhat about just asking people to submit their favorite blogs, collecting the thousand or so links and then release them in a directory ranked by submissions, or in a weekly newsletter with like 5 links? Oh hey I made that: https://forms.gle/QKdHTMJEXroyYj386 https://forms.gle/QKdHTMJEXroyYj386
- 7y ago
- datashaman 7y agoThis 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.
- majani 7y agoPost 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.
- dfischer 7y agoWow this gave me a serious flashback to late 90's websites and all the links to other sites in a network.
- captn3m0 7y agoThis should be a Jekyll plugin as well. Maybe when I get time.
- jammygit 7y agoI 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 7y agoI liked this, and added it to my site: https://www.jefftk.com/p/openring https://www.jefftk.com/p/openring