5 ms·

I love the idea of such smaller communities and the "old web" style of interaction, but for me the issue is one of discoverability. How do I find and follow peo

I love the idea of such smaller communities and the "old web" style of interaction, but for me the issue is one of discoverability. How do I find and follow people? Does anyone still use RSS, or are we relying on Mastodon/ActivityPub? Bavk in the day this was the purpose of search engines, but it seems that now such small pages are scarcely even indexed...

chongli 3y ago
Discoverability and smallness are at odds. This problem isn’t specific to the internet. That quaint, beautiful postcard town does not remain so once it’s been discovered. Eternal September happens everywhere.
- mmazing 3y ago
  > Discoverability and smallness are at odds. Is it really true on the internet though? omg.lol could presumably stay "small-appearing" and "quaint" and have millions of users. How could you really tell the difference? If it were all indexed you could drill down and find people who share your interests, that doesn't necessarily ruin the website, yeah?
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    For published works (say, a blog), discoverability is probably a good thing. For communities, however, with many-to-many communication (forums, etc.), discoverability is an antifeature. Community building requires some degree of common ground, which obscurity naturally filters for. The other downside of mass-popularity is that above a certain scale, your community becomes a target. Both for individual bad actors (spammers, vandals, etc.) and for the apex predators of the small community world, commercial interests. Look at Maker Fair transitioning from a relatively niche convention of people showing off their cool stuff they made, and some miscellaneous sponsors and vendors looking to appeal to those people, to an over-commercialized affair with a thousand people trying to sell you a 3D printer, because that's the big moneymaker. Community norms are what makes spaces worth inhabiting, and they just don't scale well.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  Nah, you just need a (not ad oriented) search engine. Things could continue to be small and niche, we just a way to find them.
  - 8372049 3y ago
    You mean kagi.com?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
mtillman 3y ago
Plug/thanks for https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ for keeping the dream alive.
xhrpost 3y ago
https://home.omg.lol/directory https://home.omg.lol/directory
treyd 3y ago
Fwiw, many feeds provided by Mastodon instances are available as RSS. Same for other Fedi software, like WriteFreely.
acegopher 3y ago
Check out the Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
culopatin 3y ago
How did we find forums back in the day? Someone said something somewhere and you looked it up. It was less discoverable but less… volatile, because it was just “your” kind of people there, not millions of random people who found a hashtag
- ClimaxGravely 3y ago
  I wonder about that myself as someone who grew up on this. I used webcrawler at the very beginning and I'm probably looking that things through rose lenses but I found what I wanted back then. I think back then in some ways it was easier to find your community because SRO and the like wasn't a thing back then. The years where I found my niche forums benefited me much more than my college days.
hooby 3y ago
Might be a tangent - but is more discoverability actually desirable in this case? Could it possibly preserve that "old web" style of interaction, if it becomes a global phenomenon that everyone uses? Or does this only work as long as it stays a little hidden niche, that most people don't know about, and will never find? Or in other words - can something feel like "the old web" (which was early adopters and enthusiasts only) - if it's frequented by everyone? You love the idea of smaller communities - but how can they stay small?
082349872349872 3y ago
have you tried https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu ?

chongli 3y ago

Discoverability and smallness are at odds. This problem isn’t specific to the internet. That quaint, beautiful postcard town does not remain so once it’s been discovered. Eternal September happens everywhere.

mmazing 3y ago
> Discoverability and smallness are at odds. Is it really true on the internet though? omg.lol could presumably stay "small-appearing" and "quaint" and have millions of users. How could you really tell the difference? If it were all indexed you could drill down and find people who share your interests, that doesn't necessarily ruin the website, yeah?
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  For published works (say, a blog), discoverability is probably a good thing. For communities, however, with many-to-many communication (forums, etc.), discoverability is an antifeature. Community building requires some degree of common ground, which obscurity naturally filters for. The other downside of mass-popularity is that above a certain scale, your community becomes a target. Both for individual bad actors (spammers, vandals, etc.) and for the apex predators of the small community world, commercial interests. Look at Maker Fair transitioning from a relatively niche convention of people showing off their cool stuff they made, and some miscellaneous sponsors and vendors looking to appeal to those people, to an over-commercialized affair with a thousand people trying to sell you a 3D printer, because that's the big moneymaker. Community norms are what makes spaces worth inhabiting, and they just don't scale well.
moralestapia 3y ago
Nah, you just need a (not ad oriented) search engine. Things could continue to be small and niche, we just a way to find them.
- 8372049 3y ago
  You mean kagi.com?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

mtillman 3y ago

Plug/thanks for https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ for keeping the dream alive.

xhrpost 3y ago

https://home.omg.lol/directory https://home.omg.lol/directory

treyd 3y ago

Fwiw, many feeds provided by Mastodon instances are available as RSS. Same for other Fedi software, like WriteFreely.

acegopher 3y ago

Check out the Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

culopatin 3y ago

How did we find forums back in the day? Someone said something somewhere and you looked it up. It was less discoverable but less… volatile, because it was just “your” kind of people there, not millions of random people who found a hashtag

ClimaxGravely 3y ago
I wonder about that myself as someone who grew up on this. I used webcrawler at the very beginning and I'm probably looking that things through rose lenses but I found what I wanted back then. I think back then in some ways it was easier to find your community because SRO and the like wasn't a thing back then. The years where I found my niche forums benefited me much more than my college days.

hooby 3y ago

Might be a tangent - but is more discoverability actually desirable in this case? Could it possibly preserve that "old web" style of interaction, if it becomes a global phenomenon that everyone uses? Or does this only work as long as it stays a little hidden niche, that most people don't know about, and will never find? Or in other words - can something feel like "the old web" (which was early adopters and enthusiasts only) - if it's frequented by everyone? You love the idea of smaller communities - but how can they stay small?

082349872349872 3y ago

have you tried https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu ?