We also had curated directories, DMOZ being the most common. Starting a bunch of DMOZ-like, federating (i.e. sharing and trusting one another to provide high-quality links, semi-comprehensive directories might be the quickest and most effective way of bringing "the old Internet" back to life. This might even become an acknowledged part of the Fediverse, if it leveraged the existing Web standards wrt. structured "third-party annotation" of outside Web resources, as issued e.g. by the W3C WebAnnotation Working Group. https://www.w3.org/annotation

Why not, with web-rings?

I don't mean that snarkily: I have at least 2-3 webrings on my personal link page, and neocities is home to literally hundreds more.

Web-rings are linked lists, slow to navigate. Google gives you hashtable access to the web.

Slow to navigate, but far less vulnerable to corruption. Each link was intentionally made by a human, vouching for its integrity and usefulness. Each link is followed only if I trust a site enough to believe its recommendation.

Maybe being slow to navigate is actually a feature, standing against the endless algorithmic torrent of 5 second tiktok videos and meme doomscrolling.

You're supposed to take your time checking out cool shit people make for the love of it.

Slow to navigate, but amenable to “browsing” and finding related pages and sites. Think of it as a built-in recommendation engine.

Which is why I wish the webmention had taken off more than it did

https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

I think it’s all missing forums, places (both public and private) where people from different “home servers” can communicate.