I mean, maybe a hot take, maybe not … casual/social voice conversations at a distance were never a good idea in the first place.

Not absolutely at least. A disconnected voice that can summon your attention at any time wherever you are is a weird, uncomfortable, unpleasant and maybe unhealthy thing.

Textual communication at a distance odd much more natural, as it matches the disconnected communication with a more formal and abstract medium.

Just a friendly reminder that climate change was predicted well ahead of time, easily decades ago, with old predictive models turning out to have been decently accurate.

well the central site of the web ring could be searched for any particular page that’s part of the ring, and that search could be surfaced on any page that’s part of the ring.

The full set of pages could be decentralised and cached across all members for robustness, and even include each page’s own description and recommendations for every other page if they like.

And then, of course … rings of webrings with as many levels of aggregation as people are interested in maintaining, again with decentralised caches of pages, their links and descriptions (all human curated of course) that can all be searched whenever a member page or aggregating page opts into it.

Tech capabilities have advanced since the 90s enough now that basic text search in a web page over a small data set is not hard or too much to ask.

And nested rings of rings of rings are scalable because at each level the data will just be links (and descriptions or names if available) while it would be on the user to navigate the various layers however they wish until they find something they’re interested in.

Sorry … I don’t know what that is

I mean, the search doesn’t have to be centralised at all … basic search facilities could include the text search in the browser for any page, but made more user friendly and just for the webring you’re navigating or something.

It was never broke, why fix it?

Totally fair! I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about! I’m just riffing on what I suspect would work for me, but also motivated by what I feel is a relatively urgent need to create some robust and diverse human curation of the internet. So in a way I’m not really interested in remaking web rings, but more coming from the perspective of what else can be done with the same general idea along side webrings.

I’m aware of it (and while not being super enthused about it, I can my personal interest growing over time as the internet keeps tracking the way it is).

But how does it help with a page recommendation system? Is there a strong culture of that sort of thing on Gemini?

That seems interesting!

In the end, I’m wondering if all the pieces are here on something like the fediverse but just need to be connected. I haven’t thought about this at all until now (so I’m just riffing here) … but the essence of such a system seems to me:

1. Recommendations are human curated
2. Recommendations come from a single human (or well defined collective)
3. Reccommendations are organised in a navigable structure

Point 3 seems to be the unclear part. A “ring” is obviously a bunch of connections (not unlike a linked list). But other structures probably have a lot to provide here, especially if they’re amenable to some basic search facility.

The idea comes up again and again on the fediverse. It feels ripe for some app/platform to kinda nail it.

I’m not sure this is it or even something that does exactly the old web ring thing. I think a simple enough system for the human curation of web pages in a standardised way that can easily be consumed and aggregated would go a long way though. The fediverse feels like its close to something.

It’s brilliant IMO (I haven’t seen the latest season but the one before … season 3 did feel like it was losing its way a bit).

The thing with mainstream super hero stuff is that it seems to very much about supporting the status quo without really examining it. Generally, the MCU has been pretty guilty of this AFAICT. It’s also why Winter Soldier is probably the best MCU film IMO … Captain America becomes “the enemy” by standing up for his principles and destroys shield.

The Boys is about examining the status quo and so stands out massively compared to all of the other mainstream superhero stuff.

The number of people I’ve come across who also dislike the character limit, the number of platforms that don’t have it, the number of times people write long microblogging threads and the prior and continued existence of the “blogosphere” count against this defeatist pessimism IMO.

The truly dark take here, IMO, is that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a medium’s configuration to shape not just the content and culture on it (that’s obvious) but the way its users come to think.

Yep this.

It’s gotten to the point where a character limit is itself a seriously toxic part of big-social social media, up there with algorithms and shitty moderation choices. But all of the Twitter people don’t see it.

Sure there are threads through reply chains. No one reads the chain. The first post is all most will see. Context collapse and superficiality is inevitable with this simple constraint. The fediverse should move on. Sadly, mastodon is the only platform still dedicated to it and they’re 80% of the fediverse.

If you like short funny quips and shit posts, that’s fine, there’s no character minimum! With long character limits, short quips still abound. Instead, when necessary, you can opt in to longer form text when necessary.

Yep.

And it’s why I bring up the journal system in every one of these conversations. That happened right under academics’ noses and they all bought into it. They were manipulated and fell right into it without caring or even thinking about the wider implications let alone having the culture to act on any issues. Like the Boomer generation and the climate, previous generations of academics let the rest of us down and we’ve not got a tertiary education system in real trouble but also tied up in so many parts of the broader social institutions that it’s gonna be hard to undo. I’m no lover of tech-bro “disruptions”, but tertiary education and high level research is actually an area where the (western) world could to with a good dose of that.

I am also struck by what this movement says about the state of universities. It reveals a deep rift between students and administrations. The latter have grown hugely over the past decades and become massive bureaucracies, also generating their own corporate interests. The voices of students and faculty have been gradually marginalised in the process, making productive dialogue often difficult.

Yet we must also be vigilant about the academic culture: when we say that universities must be a “safe space”, this is not only true in terms of physical and emotional integrity (which are paramount) but also in terms of intellectual integrity: a university is a space in which one can be, and should be, safely challenged, rather than confirmed in their convictions.

I’ve been saying for a while that western civilisation, whether you’re a fan or not, has been dying in the universities and that this will leak out to the rest of the culture. The corporatisation, commodification and production-line-ification have been rampant from the educational to the research aspects of the institutions … all without dismantling the underlying feudal structures which are quite good at corrupting higher values in the name of succeeding at the KPI games of the commodification etc.

Unfortunately it’s a boiling frog situation and many academics idealise detatchment from the real world however problematic their institution is. That the for-profit journal system could be built entirely around academics’ labour simply by offering “prestige credits” is astonishing for an allegedly intelligent demographic but tells you all you need to know about how corrupted by libertarian values and behaviours a bunch of clever people trying to attain prestige by proving how clever they are … can get.

Big issue IMO. Never touched it for that reason.

A personal knowledge system has to be designed to last the rest of your life.

I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.

Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.

EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.

your own hacked together wrapper around sqlite as a plugin for your text editor of choice

perfect!

It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

Yep. The idea has been buzzing in my head since I read Casey’s post and thought about it as “Tech moving on from the web”. For those of us who like it, we’ll just be left to (re-)make it ourselves. It’s a weird feeling for me honestly.

It’s almost like the eternal September is actually ending.

Absolutely.

And this is why I’m seeing Google winning this. They’ve got the infrastructure for both running and training their AI as well as the long standing web scraping for getting in as much data as soon as possible. But they’ve also got the ads business and the brand and user base. Together, they’ll be the first to get AI tech to the point of being able to insert ads or other paid endorsements (however hard that is) and the first monetise that through ads and userbase size. Meanwhile Microsoft (OpenAI’s backer) will probably do what MS has often done which is fail to piece together a coherent business model and squander an opportunity on failing to monetise.