What in the Geocities?! Have I fallen into a timewarp?

Possibly. Although if you’ve ended up in the mid-2020s you have my deepest sympathies. I hope that wherever you’ve fallen from the future is brighter than the third-rate cyberpunk dystopia we’re currently experiencing, and you make it back home safely soon. We don’t even have jet packs, dammit!

But if you’re native to this crappy decade, then you definitely haven’t. It’s 2025 and the internet has become so unusable I’m starting a webring.

Why?

Established methods for finding traffic have become increasingly hostile to their users. Google have sabotaged their search results, offering up a useless mix of adverts and AI-generated bullshit; Facebook and Instagram suppress content with off-site links, and are filled with boomers, bots & hate speech, and Twitter makes Mos Eisley Cantina look like Balamory.

As a result, independent creators are being shut out of the internet, and forced to surrender huge amounts of their revenues to platforms like Amazon, Meta and Etsy for the privilege of finding an audience.

So I’m trying something new. Or rather, something old, using the ways we found traffic before Google and social media came to dominate the web. And as Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves are long-defunct, it’s back to webrings.

What’s a Webring?

For the benefit of anyone born after 1994, or who was too cool to be on the internet in the late 1990s, here’s a quick history lesson:  In the early days of the World Wide Web, search engines were… not great. Most people found websites through recommendation via message boards and chat rooms/clients. This made reaching an audience a little difficult.

To increase the chances of someone stumbling across their website, early webmasters would create and join webrings, groups of sites with similar themes, or run by a cohort of friends, that would link to one another. When a user stumbled across one site in the ring, they would see a small advert for the webring, and might end up clicking through to another site. In some circumstances they might click through to multiple sites, discovering a small corner of the internet they were otherwise unaware of. Think of it as the late 20^th Century doomscrolling, but less miserable and more hopeful.

What sort of sites are in this webring?

In short, culture. That could be art, or writing, comics, illustration & design, photos & videos, music or video games. It could be original work, or analyses of existing media. And it can be a personal site or a commercial one. The main intention behind this is to get more eyes on interesting work.

With that said, this webring won’t include sites that feature any of the following:

• Out and out smut
  • Artistic nudes and suggestive writing are fine, but I don’t want someone to click through to the next site while sitting on a train, and find themselves in trouble for looking at filth.
• AI
  • If your work is made by machines, this isn’t the place for you
• Tech evangelism
  • Tech can be cool. Weird, geeky projects involving fun hardware and programming stuff are amazing, but techbros are killing the world and the whole reason we’re doing this in the first place. So I’m not steering traffic to their defenders.
• Far right politics
  • If you find this offensive or upsetting, good. You’re a terrible person and should be ashamed of yourself.

Can I Join?

Probably. The two requirements are that your site fits the description above, and you’re able to stick the code for the webring somewhere on that site – ideally the sidebar or footer. There’s no minimum or maximum traffic requirement, no need to post loads, and no way to post too much. All you need do is get in touch with me with a link to your site and a quick intro (if I don’t already know you), and I’ll explain the next steps.

Is that it? I thought it would be more complicated.

For now. While the ring is small (or indeed, non-existent) the goal is to simply build it up with a few other people.

Beyond that, once there are a few members, I’ll stick a page up here as the ‘homepage’ of the webring, profiling the sites in the webring, and a snippet from the most recent post from each site. If it really takes off, I’ll set up a separate site just to host that.

But for now the job is just to build up a small webring, and drive traffic between cool sites like we used to.