This one has categories and filtering options, nice! Random is good to have (see also https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random)

https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819

This is more of a nostalgia or niche link list. It's not the same purpose as yahoo in the 90s.

What are these lists you're talking about? Could you give an example?

My thought exactly, and also why I don't just search 'latest news' on Google every morning. Human curation is a thing. (not sure how much human curation goes into ooh.directory, but I'm pretty sure they don't use Google's ranking algorithms to surface links)

* or "surfing the net", if you're old enough.

But well... the problem is almost the same: too few info == too much info => No enough info to make decisions.

The youngest Millennial is 26, so they probably knew at least a little when they were young about what Yahoo was.

Yahoo is how baby me learned the word 'hierarchical'.

Why, oh why....? Stuck in hospital, so much free time free, so many restrictions, and yet so few - what am i missing, or likely to have missed, being on mobile?

Ohh.nostalgia

http://www.odp.org/homepage.php (archive)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_License

https://web.archive.org/web/20070813215202/http://www.dmoz.o...

"The Free Software Foundation describes the ODL as a non-free license"

But your point is a good one and well taken.

https://curlie.org/

Ever considered to publish this list as an easily searchable and exportable OPML file?

Curation, combined with good categorization, is sorely needed in today's internet.

The solution of "search" (aka Google) just doesn't cut it if you want to discover the best publications in a topic area.

I hope this project takes off!

A nice addition would be having account, and being able to like it. Likes are not public, but instead combine to show you things other people liked as well. Since they are not public, hopefully that will discourage gaming it.

Remind me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

(It's my site.)

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This site can’t be reached

But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.

I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.

I prefer Mark Twain's “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the personal websites are coming back.

Those were cool because only specific type of people were able to build websites, then the code free services for sharing content came along and everybody got online presence but because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium. The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't think we have found it just yet!

That has its own history

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/karl_marx_382655

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_L...

So really it was Engels.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

I wonder how soon people will start to collaboratively train ML models for curation, by their acts if curation, much like spam filters are trained today.

I am just sad that my very unfocused blog doesn't really fit into any of their categories.

Nonetheless, this is a really cool project!

> Some blogs appear in two or, occasionally, three categories. If it would take more than that, it ends up in the wonderland of Uncategorizable.

Since there's no way to select multiple categories in the "suggest" form, I take it you will manually amend the entry.

https://ooh.directory/about/

- Every blog must have an RSS or Atom feed.

- Newsletters aren't included. Some sites are a blog and a newsletter, with identical content, but only those which mainly seem like a blog are included.

- Only blogs updated within the past year or so are added.

- Tumblrs are only included if they’re either focused on a specific topic or feature original content.

- Link blogs are only included if they include original commentary about each link.

- No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.

I've heard of Twitter accounts getting banned because they mentioned some of these subjects in context of criticizing them. (which is the opposite result that would be expected)

How their curation process work is just as important as the rules themselves. If it's transparent and there's a person (not just an automated algorithm), is there also a recourse process for false positives or bad decision making?

(the key part of my concern)

Here's an example of the difficulty.

"Phil, can you review the article [link to blog] where you banned us from? We are critically analyzing a very socially sensitive topic and while we are disagreeing with the majority of people, we actually encouraging unity and are not encouraging any hate. You can clearly see if you read our entire article."

My comment above is the very reason for this discussion. Not using the site is the same as suggesting not commenting here, which is nearly nonsensical.

Can we have this for the entire Internet, please? Thanks.

There are countless healthy and active blogs that you can read via RSS. There are great RSS reader apps.

For us technically-minded folks we need to keep being proactive about helping people read the web via RSS, improving discovery, and continually making RSS a first-class option on sites we build.

I also agree that RSS is still worth it. I am a happy subscriber to Newsblur: https://newsblur.com/

Indeed, the mess that is Twitter is giving me hope that we'll see a comeback of people self-hosting their content.

>> "Why would anyone implement it?"

Because your assumption is wrong.

Wasn't it Basecamp/37Signals who said to emulate drugs dealers and give the first try away for free? ;)

I wonder where this meme came from.

If I had 10x the visitors I might see things differently but I think a lot of small blogs are in my boat.

1) You can follow websites (based on blog-post titles) when there isn't a proper RSS feed.

2) You have control on how many results per feed to have listed (e.g. not having your whole feed overloaded with the posts of one source)

3) You can assign priorities to Sources and categories so that you have control what's on top of your feed.

... if someone here bothers to give it a try, I'd be happy to receive any feedback.

p.s. there's a full OPML import/export support.

It’s the opposite for me. Almost every blog exports the full text. It used to be the other way, but that was in the GReader times.

> The feed reader for people that want to be in control

I find that a questionable headline with no self-hosting option.

And it misses screenshots, I never sign up blind for anything.

However...do I get this by e-mail? In an app? Web interface? Maybe you could add some screenshots to your page :-)

Wondering who thought new domains should be blocked "just in case" and how they determine that. What percentage of requests the service receives are domains its never seen before? Assuming 90% or so are like, google, facebook, etc, but what if someone has a phone app that calls weird api domains? Actually that might explain some of the random weird failures I've been seeing on this trip...

Anyone else notice everything old is new again? Neocities[0], Marginalia Search[1], Project Gemini[2], etc

There's many others I'm forgetting, and new ones popup on Hackernews each week.

Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days?

[0] https://neocities.org/

[1] https://www.marginalia.nu/

[2] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

[0] https://spacehey.com/

That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit.

Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.)

If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.

Is there an OPML file that lists all of the blogs it knows about?

As an aside, I wish JSON feed would've taken off :-/ I know, I know, another standard - but it was a better one I think.

I also recently started making some portal with curated links and feeds. I call it Discovery Portals. The very small beginning can be found at https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/

I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts. Maybe ActivityPub makes that possible.

The only service of which I am aware that allows for comments on RSS is https://linklonk.com/ . Are there other approaches to bring comments to RSS streams?

Maybe ooh.directory can use ActivityPub to allow commenting and voting on the entries. Comments on HN are great to check for problems with an article. That should also be true for comments about entire blogs.

>In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment.

I share this view. What do you think about a concept wherein a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' with an email form? It will look like a regular comment textarea under some blogpost, but the commenting is done by email. The reaction isn't immediately visible under the blogpost (if at all) and therefor everything works humanly slow. But there's also no signup required, so it's more anonymous and openly accessible.

From my point of view, that's the future.

Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks.

Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience.

We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated.

It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts.

What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.

> Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience.

I agree, but I was thinking of some filtering function wherein the webmaster can whitelist/blacklist comments. If a certain site or topic attracts - for whatever reason - visitors who abuse the comments, the webmaster needs to be able to block stuff afterwards or even upfront. An ideal life would be wherein every visitor/commenter does only nice things.

> Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts.

Interesting idea. I always like it when I get responses on my videos/comments on Youtube from years ago.

There is definitely more to improve, but I'd like to see more use of the comments section first to know what needs to be improved next.

As for ActivityPub, I just saw https://go-fed.org/ on HN and it looks like a good fit to add ActivityPub support to LinkLonk (since it is written in Go). There are multiple ways to do it, so let me know how you would like to see it working. Do you want to follow posts of Mastodon users on LinkLonk (similar to how it shows you RSS content)? Do you want Mastodon users to be able to follow your channels on LinkLonk (e.g. @[email protected])?

Great!

>how you would like to see it working

That's a difficult question. My primary focus is on the availability of discussions. Nevertheless, integrating LinkLonk in both directions with Mastodon should help with growth. There doesn't seem to be an algorithmic timeline, which LinkLonk could provide. Establishing LinkLonk as an integrated RSS Reader and ActivityPub Client could attract a bigger user base that makes calculating suggestions easier.

What ActivityPub can bring to new social networks like LinkLonk is the ability to share the comment section with various other providers. E.g. RSS readers or annotating browser plugins can pool their comments in one place to have an active discussion even if each tool has a small user number.

However, pooling discussions is generally avoided:

1. When there is a dupe on HN, the discussion in the old submission is not continued.

2. There exist various aggregators like lobste.rs, reddit.com/programming or tildes.net, that almost discuss the same articles as HN, but they are different communities.

3. Twitter and Mastodon could pool the replies to posts of the same url, but they don't.

The trivial approach for LinkLonk would be an integration with lemmy.ml and all Mastodon posts that discuss the same URL. That way, most posts would come with a discussion and LinkLonk instantly had a vibrant community.

With the pool-avoiding behavior in mind, some adjustments could be needed but I haven't figured out what that could be.

The IndieWeb community is focused on this with Social Readers[1] and Webmentions[2]. The core idea is your reader also ties into your own published feed, so you can make a comment right in your reader that publishes the comment to your own feed and sends a webmention to the original article so they know about it.

Barriers to entry are still kinda high (much like making a website 25 years ago) so any adoption should lead to a better signal/noise ratio. Unless it becomes popular enough for bots to start spamming the webmentions...

[1]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader

[2]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention

Ideally this system would also be integrated into browsers you you can see and write comments even when visiting a URL directly.

[1]:https://havenweb.org

Alternatively, you could use something like a Discus embed for comments but I didn't want to have one more thing to manage.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991129033212/http://www.wannal...

Back then, it had a lot of very interesting info to learn about several subjects. I yearn for that internet.

https://guardian.gyford.com/

oohya.directory

It's currently possible to filter each category to only show blogs that have been updated within the past week/month/year, which should help.

If it gets to the point where there are lots of blogs that are still live, but haven't been updated for a long time, maybe I'll make the default to only show blogs that have been updated within a year or so. We'll see.

I can see which blogs generate errors of different kinds when fetching their feeds, so I'll be able to spot blogs that disappear. If that happens they'll be removed/hidden from the site.

Well that's a shame, there's quite a few out there that pose credible and interesting questions and discussions around some of these topics.

Basically this is saying: "No conservative blogs allowed" which erases at least 50% or more of the population's musings.

I'd love to see an aggregator that isn't politically motivated and biased as this one is. The internet would be a better, freer place.

We may even find that these "hateful", "alarming" ideas are in fact mainstream after all and being unfairly suppressed by sites like these as well as legacy media, social media, etc. under the guise of the greater good.

Curious which population (country?) you are referring to that’s 50% or more conservative

You would be shocked at how many things no longer exist, but previously existed with incredible support and numbers behind them. Everything from Facebook groups, YouTube videos, blog posts, websites, etc. -- too many mediums to list, and yet, unreferenceable here because they've been taken down by the liberal moderation machine who's unwilling to view their opponents as valid participants of grander dialogues, so instead, enact policies of erasure rather than honest debate.

It is not a fair game when those who are in power _are_ the ones deciding what can and cannot exist in the public scene, causing them to remain unchallenged, and prevents their political opponents from obtaining power by suppressing their use of the standard avenues of communication.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080529000125/http://technorati...

Nowadays, I find Feedly topics a good place to explore RSS sources. I believe it is human curation, so it is kind of a directory too (though less "indie" and not restricted to blogs). You can sort by Followers (=popularity) and articles/week.

When I started blogging again some time ago my first question was what might be the modern equivalent, and I found none.

Also there're tools that helps you to create rss feed for sites which have no rss feed: https://github.com/tabhub/rssify

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