Nostalgia aside, this is at least one solution to the problem of content discovery and relevance being driven entirely towards corporate interests and SEO by Google.

I'm not certain I like the premise of the design of the banner being up to ring administrators - design should be up to the site owners.

I'm also wondering if this isn't a bit overengineered. With just the index JSON file and an id indicating a site, you have most of what you need to generate "previous" and "next" links, and you could do that with vanilla javascript, without web components, without requiring cloud hosting, without a dependency tree.

I'm probably being a curmudgeon about it, I really like the idea and there's nothing wrong with it as is, it just seems far more complex than it needs to be.

I didn't even use webrings in the 90s. I preferred altavista.

And this is why webrings didn't all the way work -- broken links!