To save the internet, we may have to rebuild it.

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To save the internet, we may have to rebuild it.

An introduction to how Ringspace webrings work—from both a member site and ring server perspective

Monitors and collects webrings.json data

Monitors and collects webrings.json data

This is a great post, but obviously it hasn’t convinced me: The folks waving their arms and yelling about recent models’ capabilities have a point: the thing works. This project finished in three weeks. Compare that to Ringspace, a similarly-sized project that took me about six months of nights and early mornings to complete, while not doing my day job or being Dad to an amazing, but demanding toddler. I simply could not have built this project as well or as quickly without help. And as other developers have noted, this is the help that’s showing up. I’m not entirely onboard with Mike Masnick’s optimistic view of this technology’s democratizing power. I don’t think it’s as easy to separate the tech from its provenance or corporate control. But CertGen, my certificate application, exists now. It didn’t and couldn’t without the help of a tool like Claude Code. Open source in particular needs to reckon with this, because the current situation of demanding developers starve and bleed themselves dry without support isn’t tenable. We need to grapple with this. I’m not yet sure how it all breaks down, and anyone who says they do is lying, foolish, or fanatical. ↫ Michael Taggart If you disregard that “AI” models are trained on stolen data, that such data was prepared by exploited workers, that “AI” data centres have a hugely negative impact on the environment, that “AI” data centers are distorting the entire computing market, that “AI” models they feed the endless firehose of intentional misinformation, that they are wreaking havoc in education, that they increase your reliance on American big tech companies, that you pay “AI” companies for taking your work, that “AI” models are a vital component in the technofascist wet dreams of their creators, that they are the cornerstone of politicians’ dream of ending anonymity, and that they contribute to racist and abusive policing, then yes, sometimes, they produce code that works and isn’t total horseshit. It’s a deeply depressing reversed “what have the Romans ever done for us?” that makes me sad, more than anything. I’ve seen so many otherwise smart, caring, and genuine people just shove all of these massive downsides aside for the mere novelty, the peer pressure, the occasional sense that their “lines of code” metric is going up. It’s the digital equivalent of rolling coal.

> Ringspace is an attempt to revive the old concept of webrings, but with an added twist: mutual verification of identity and reputation. Historically, webrings were simply a “doubly-linked list” of sites, in which each member provided links to the previous and next members in the ring. A simple concept, brilliantly effective in its time to organize the web into discrete, discoverable communities in a time before search engines. > Ringspace achieves this through a hybrid model of decentralized site “manifests” and a central coordination server that performs validation, updates member sites on changes in the ring, and also handles trust and safety concerns for the ring. > > This repository provides everything necessary to get started with the Ringspace “protocol,” including the manifest specification, server API specification, and reference implementation.

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