Back in the day the best way to find cool sites when you were on a cool site was to click next in the webring. In this age of ailing search engines and confidently incorrect AI, it is time for the webring to make a comeback.
This person has given his the code to get started: Webring
There has to be a cultural shift as well. It’s not the early 2000s anymore where a substantial portion of internet users could tinker around their desktop computers. I recently got fiber at home and we’re locked behind CGNAT. I could look for a solution for myself since I grew up opening ports on my router, but imagine someone who grew up with bubble-wrapped smartphones trying to navigate their way through that bs.
Website hosting is still a thing. Not everything needs to be self hosted.
You’re not wrong, but here we are, talking open source and GPL licences. If you can make a game portal work, or the web in general, it’s viable, your ISP is a choke point though, agreed. Was more talking about an easy stack like the 'arrs, but for webrings, just an idea…
At least now we have options like Pikapods where you can just throw a containerized server up cheap. Even people who might be overwhelmed by a VM can do that.
I also just got fiber from AT&T. I’m pretty grateful that their gateway/router can just offload all traffic to my own router and a t as just a dumb gateway. Right now I use duckdns to just public host a subsonic server for when I’m in the car or out and about but it’s been very pain free.
I read up a little on cgnat but can you tell me what issues you face? I’m curious.
Never mind… read up on it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
I guess the alternative would be routing everything through a static ip providing vpn