The heyday of the forums. For about 2 years the combination of Tapatalk and forums was awesome. Centralized interface with no ads, all the discussion.
Then they both gutted their functionality and spammed in the ads.
Comment on Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 months agoI love Lemmy but I really, really miss the old web. Back when people would just create their own website and put it out there to share their niche interest with the world. People just organically linked their sites to each other to form web rings, an easy method of federation without any reliance on sophisticated server-side software.
The_v@lemmy.world 3 months ago
fossilesque@mander.xyz 3 months ago
They’re still around.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 months ago
How do I find them though? I would love a search engine that only finds these sites and excludes all the commercial ones and all the ad spam.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 3 months ago
Good news! search.marginalia.nu
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I did a search for shoelaces and I got a bunch of stack overflow links as well as Wikipedia. I don’t consider WP to be commercial but SO definitely is. I did not get a result for Ian’s shoelace site, which is what I was hoping to find. Even searching for “Ian’s shoelace site” did not find it, whereas the same query on DDG brought it right up (top of the results).
amanda@aggregatet.org 3 months ago
I still do this!
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
Does anyone find your stuff? Search engines seem to be less and less capable of finding indie websites and pick most results to shopping and/or image results, or else if it’s a question it goes Reddit/quora/stack exchange before any search results.
I finally shut off my old self hosted Wordpress last year because traffic had dwindled to a couple hits a month or less. Besides the constant bot traffic trying to hijack the site.
amanda@aggregatet.org 3 months ago
No idea honesty, I don’t collect metrics.