What you want is ActivityPub: https://activitypub.rocks/

It's the underlying protocol that connects the various federated services in the "Fediverse", (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) like Mastodon, PeerTube, NextCloud, etc. At root it's just a standardized way for nodes in a network to send messages to each other, though, so you could use it to get those "connections of a social network" you're looking for. And then Mastodon users, say, could get updates/notifications from your site/service/whatever right in their feed.

RSS - (partially) Google killed it.

My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls.

Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming since the 80's, HTML was just weird).

I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands.

20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)

RSS is alive, and for dumb sites there are hacks such as https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/-

I love RSS-Bridge. I have a local instance running, and it saves me from having to sign up with Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Also, tt-rss is an excellent reader.

I was interested in tt-rss until I tried it out and there was a problem with the Android app. I checked the forums for a solution...

If you do check out the forums for it you will very quickly see that the developer is a massive asshole.

I wouldn't trust any code that a person like that writes to run on my machine.

I forked tt-rss back in 2005 for my personal use after I tried to submit a few patches that didn't "align well" w/ the developer. I wouldn't go so far as to say "massive asshole", but he did seem to be a challenge to deal with. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to try to contribute back my changes.

You have a trailing - and also neat!.

I was able to enjoy TNG from the get go. It's one of the few shows where the stories have any depth. Although I did start watching it when I was in my twenties, so that could have been a factor in being able to pick up on the subtler themes

I watched TNG as it aired, that and Quantum Leap where my favourites as a kid at a time when UK TV was four channels and sci-fi was rare.

Bit of a shameless plug... but that's kind of what we're building @ find.xyz.

Here's an example of some weird shit in the dessert. https://find.xyz/map/toto-forever

Also one on the death of RSS since someone mentioned that https://find.xyz/map/what-happened-to-rss

Nice idea!

You've got a typo on https://find.xyz/about : s/beatuful/beautiful/g

Ha. Damn. Thanks :)

Stumbleupon was a good resource for this.

Websites have had comments sections since well before social networks took off. Even in the Geocities days, you had "Sign my Guestbook/View my Guestbook". Some truly old-school websites, like Mark Prindle Reviews, included email responses from people who read his work.

Trying to shoehorn social media profile integration into this system will eventually end up influencing the content, and once more it'll be a race to the bottom, with everyone posting stuff only for other people's validation. It shouldn't work that way for the 'weird web'.

Tumblr?

Tumblr gave itself up and will be irrelevant soon.

This. Weird and fun I exactly how I see Tumblr.

That, sprinkled with a bit of CP on top

youall forgot to mention beaker browser.