11 ms·
This is excellent, however I think that discussion of implementation details is obscuring the real glory of this project. Allow me to explain. Once upon a time
by korse 6y ago
This is excellent, however I think that discussion of implementation details is obscuring the real glory of this project. Allow me to explain.
Once upon a time, I spent a whole lot of time in physical libraries. To this day, I remain enamored with the 'stacks', those 'endless' rows of roughly categorized text that allowed for discovery of knowledge new to an individual in a manner that the post usenet internet seems to be unable to emulate.
Why, when we have the 'sum of all human knowledge in our pocket' does an interface similar to library stacks not exist? Search engines in their modern forms were probably unavoidable, just as librarians and card catalogues are necessary to help patrons quickly access specific information, but a library without public access to the stacks is hardly worth visiting. In fact, libraries were like this during a particularly dark period in western history and only though the work of a handful of forward thinking librarians did public access become the norm.
The agora 'nodes' listing is possibly the closest I have seen to a 'stacks' like structure for the modern internet. To me, regardless of implementation, this is a momentous achievement. Also, if anyone knows of a similar structure, please let me know.