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Amelia

Internet search sucks now.

Making a classic "search engine" requires obscene amounts of money and resources, so creating direct competition is not a realistic option.

But what if we had a way to each take our own personal bookmarks and link collections, and share them, using a federated protocol?

My fifty sites, your sixty-five links, some friends and their contributions... All hand-selected and vetted, manually tagged and organized by real people... Hosted on small, volunteer-run servers...

What if web search results were organized not by "how many ad dollars did this site generate for the search company" but rather something like "someone you know directly tagged this site, and someone twice-removed tagged this other site so it's lower priority"?

#DisabilityDrivenDevelopment

23 Jun 2023 at 15:08 | Open on lgbt.io
42 comments
Phantom Manor

@mordremoth That's exactly what I've been saying!

23 Jun 2023 at 15:09 | Open on weirder.earth
ajsWritesThings

@mordremoth@lgbt.io 100% believe that this is the huge thing that's missing. I keep saying it, but 'federated stumbleupon' wouldn't be a bad place to start

23 Jun 2023 at 15:13 | Open on calckey.social
June Blender

@mordremoth Amelia, where can I learn about disability-driven development? Is there a seminal book or online class for developers?

23 Jun 2023 at 15:15 | Open on mstdn.social
Amelia

@juneb Check out spoonstack.org/ and particularly the Essays section!

23 Jun 2023 at 15:29 | Open on lgbt.io
The Doctor
Amelia

@drwho Yep, exactly. Except this process needs to be far, far more accessible so that the barriers to participate don't just create a content bubble of "stuff highly techy people have collected."

The raw ability has existed for years. What's missing is a good experience.

23 Jun 2023 at 15:31 | Open on lgbt.io
Cyber Yuki

@mordremoth We need to bring back internet directory sites.

EDIT:

Remember Yahoo! pages?

Entertainment / Games / Roleplaying / Dungeons & Dragons

Adding your page was TRIVIAL.

23 Jun 2023 at 15:21 | Open on hackers.town
mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl

@mordremoth very interested to talk about this! Have been thinking about this for quite a while! Here are some of my notes:
- publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Pro

23 Jun 2023 at 15:21 | Open on hachyderm.io
Amelia

@mnl Love seeing how many people are already contemplating ways to do this!

To be honest I think as long as we lean towards maximum inter-operability and keep a focus on personal control, this has real potential to reshape Internet use entirely.

23 Jun 2023 at 15:33 | Open on lgbt.io
Cyberpunk Librarian

@mordremoth Federated del.icio.us? I'm on board for that.

23 Jun 2023 at 15:27 | Open on hackers.town
deprecated

@mordremoth yeah just a big directory would be cool, and putting in requests for this or that could be handy too

23 Jun 2023 at 15:39 | Open on mastodon.art
cyborg

@evel @mordremoth I sort of expected that someone writes to this post that this already exists and links to it.
Boosting and waiting.

23 Jun 2023 at 16:07 | Open on kind.social
deprecated

@cy @mordremoth i'd like lots and lots to exist really!

23 Jun 2023 at 16:45 | Open on mastodon.art
Earthshine

@mordremoth This is exactly what OpenCola was meant to provide. opencola.io/

23 Jun 2023 at 15:55 | Open on hackers.town
Amelia

@earthshine Cool!

I'd love to see their work after some heavy engagement with some accessibility advocates.

23 Jun 2023 at 16:05 | Open on lgbt.io
chris
Nima

@mordremoth the other day I searched for "timer for windows 10" and Google gave me blue light filter websites!!

23 Jun 2023 at 16:26 | Open on techhub.social
Nima
Amelia

@point5a Link aggregators were huge for a while, yes.

The main failing they all shared was being centralized services. Their growth and success inherently required increasing costs and complexity - a "vertical scaling" problem, by nature.

Federated, decentralized solutions face other challenges, but by nature are horizonal scaling models, which means they are less likely to require a single entity to spend huge amounts of money keeping things on.

23 Jun 2023 at 16:39 | Open on lgbt.io
Nima

@mordremoth I believe future is decentralized. Social decentralized bookmarking is sounds really good idea.

23 Jun 2023 at 16:49 | Open on techhub.social
theo

@mordremoth github.com/owdex/owdex

federation would be a long way away but theoretically i see no reason it wouldn’t work

23 Jun 2023 at 17:01 | Open on glitch.theocourt.com
DELETED

@mordremoth so would this be like pinboard.in but federated and maybe it'd be capable of marking which sites are recced by multiple people? That could be really cool!

23 Jun 2023 at 17:18 | Open on mastodon.art
pygoscelis_papua

@mordremoth Federated social bookmarking site? I like it. I think I've seen projects in that vein but I'm down to start one too.

23 Jun 2023 at 17:35 | Open on honks.io
Dexter

@mordremoth I thought this was the intention of what link aggregator sites like Lemmy/Kbin are designed to do.

EDIT: My apologies, I reread this and it comes off hella aggressive, which absolutely isn't my intent.

More just I'm curious if Lemmy/Kbin fit what you're describing, and what would need to be different if they currently don't.

23 Jun 2023 at 18:59 | Open on retro.pizza
Amelia

@wheeljack They are designed to be link aggregation systems, yes, but I'm not talking about replacing link aggregation - I'm talking about replacing web search.

My point here is that decentralized link aggregation could be a great starting point for replacing the classic "crawl and index" systems that make centralized search engines extremely costly.

23 Jun 2023 at 19:32 | Open on lgbt.io
Malaĉa maman chat 🌟

@mordremoth I had this exact idea a few months ago… a federated website directory

23 Jun 2023 at 19:10 | Open on eldritch.cafe
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
@mordremoth sixty-five?

I have 224 public bookmarks and counting: https://hacktivis.me/bookmarks

And then there's link-sharing dedicated platforms like lemmy, shaarli, lobsters, … that probably go well in the thousands.
23 Jun 2023 at 19:32 | Open on queer.hacktivis.me
PrivateGER :owo:

@mordremoth@lgbt.io look into yacy
it goes into that direction

23 Jun 2023 at 19:34 | Open on plasmatrap.com
Auden Wolf

@mordremoth Yesss! I want something like this to exist. I would totally curate a small directory of links on certain topics I'm knowledgeable about.

23 Jun 2023 at 19:41 | Open on tech.lgbt
Stay-At-Home Solarparent

@mordremoth

This seems a lot more useful than my idea of bringing back web rings.

23 Jun 2023 at 20:12 | Open on sunbeam.city
Amelia

@solarpunkgnome The only real failure of web rings was not having tools to automatically share, connect, and grow them!

23 Jun 2023 at 20:23 | Open on lgbt.io
leo vriscrab² (homestuck) :dado_verified:

@mordremoth i feel like search engines are used for both "recommending resources" and "finding answers to very specific questions"
i think this would only really be practical for the former

23 Jun 2023 at 20:15 | Open on 60228.dev
Amelia

@leo That's fair, but part of the issue right now is that using search engines to answer questions is increasingly ill-advised, due to the growth of pure junk masquerading as content for SEO/advertising purposes.

I'm thinking about a world where we talk to people to answer questions instead.

23 Jun 2023 at 20:25 | Open on lgbt.io
leo vriscrab² (homestuck) :dado_verified:

@mordremoth i dont think we should just accept that problem as unsolvable
needing to find an expert to talk to to answer every question i have would not be a good thing

23 Jun 2023 at 20:29 | Open on 60228.dev
leo vriscrab² (homestuck) :dado_verified:

@mordremoth (....especially considering that in a lot of fields even experts heavily use search engines to answer questions nowadays!)

23 Jun 2023 at 20:30 | Open on 60228.dev
immibis
@mordremoth It's noteworthy that a big part of the obscene money and resources is finding good quality content automatically. If you allow some manual intervention - and especially if you crowdsource it like you are suggesting - that part can be much cheaper. For example, any old fool could make a search engine limited to WIkipedia and Stack Overflow. Although the internet is a zillion jiggabytes, I doubt the *useful, searchable, text-based* internet is bigger than a single server rack full of hard drives.
23 Jun 2023 at 20:17 | Open on social.immibis.com
AnthropoceneMan

@mordremoth

That’s so Meta…in a literal sense, and in a good way.

23 Jun 2023 at 20:29 | Open on universeodon.com
Travis 🇺🇦
sarah 🦦

@mordremoth i wonder how well link aggregators like that work for specific researches (debugging issues, needing precise info on niche subjects)

23 Jun 2023 at 20:42 | Open on tech.lgbt
Tobias Hellgren

@mordremoth We used to have that, it was called a web ring.

23 Jun 2023 at 20:46 | Open on mastodon.chuggybumba.com
contrôliste

@mordremoth It's still corporare silo hell, but I've had a great experience with are.na. Being able to see who saved the same links as you really helps discovering stuff

23 Jun 2023 at 20:52 | Open on ludosphere.fr
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