Hacker News

> This tool is inspired by Kagi Small Web

To me the way Kagi curates its small web directory always feel contradictory to the spirit of independent web publishing because it seems like you have to submit entries through GitHub — a highly centralized platform owned by one of the largest tech companies.

kudos to you for figuring out a decentralized solution.

This is so delightful! I'll be deploying this and sharing a link on the issue.

One issue I see: If I get you to include a link to my console but I don't link to any others, I can trap wanderers within my recommendations until they refresh.

If that's not desirable, it could be avoided by having the client keep a running list of all the consoles it has discovered this session and choosing from that list at random.

This is delightful! I found a bunch of interesting sites in just a few minutes. I appreciate your simple and decentralized approach.

I'm going to set this up on my website as a replacement for my boring blogroll list.

Incidentally, I made something similar (also called Wander!) that uses browser bookmarks as a source of links. It's a browser extension called "Wander your bookmarks" and helps you wander through sites you bookmarked in the past. In addition to jumping you to a random bookmark, you can also filter your bookmarks by keyword and jump from that shortened list. Check it out here: http://kmshiva.com/projects/wander.html .

It doesn't seem very hard to implement in your own site, so it might gain some traction? It's not super-complex, I understand it is some sort of interconnected spin on webrings, which are still somewhat popular among small websites.

If anybody wants to find truly random small websites, I recommend using Wiby (search engine). It has some neat stuff.

[dead]

I've thought of a service that scans new websites and GitHub repos and looks for things that don't look like anything else (using something like hdbscan for outlier detection), and creates a feed for people to follow.

Stumble upon led to most of my interests in life, so happy for this

Thank you for taking a look at this project. I'm glad you like the concept. I am not sure I have understood your question accurately, but let me attempt a response anyway. If I get it wrong, please feel free to correct me or ask me again.

There is no need to re-download https://codeberg.org/susam/wander every few weeks. The setup is a one-time activity. From that repository, you copy exactly two files (index.html and wander.js) and place them on your web server, preferably within a /wander/ directory. After that, you only maintain the wander.js file.

You curate your own links and choose which other Wander consoles to link to as neighbours. The contents of wander.js are entirely yours to define. There is no need to diff or compare it with the version in the repository.

In fact, if you do not care about updating or curating links often, you can leave both files untouched indefinitely. The only downside is that some links may eventually succumb to link rot, which could affect the wandering experience. So it may help to review your links occasionally and remove dead ones, but beyond that no ongoing maintenance is required.

What you are describing sounds a bit like a blogroll, which many of us do indeed maintain. Mine is here, by the way: https://susam.net/roll.html

However, Wander is meant to be a bit like StumbleUpon, but without requiring a centralised service that everyone must go through. One limitation of a blogroll is that it does not provide a consistent way to discover recommendations recursively. For example, I might visit your website A, which recommends website B. I might then visit B, but B may not have any recommendations at all.

Every Wander instance, on the other hand, has a defined list of recommendations. It also links to the /wander pages of its neighbouring sites. If you visit the /wander page of website A, the tool can discover its neighbours (B, C, etc.), then the neighbours of those neighbours and so on. It can fetch recommended links from them and present the links within the same console.

Additionally, the tool provides a way to leave the current console and move to a neighbour's console if the visitor wants to continue browsing from there.

Because the discovery is transitive. When you wander, it fetches another console's wander.js and picks from their pages, so you're not just exploring one person's list, you're hopping across a graph of curated lists. A static link page can't necessarily do that.

And forums and word of mouth!

Thank you for taking a look at this project. I'm glad you liked it.

You make a fair point. I put this together in about 1.5 hours in the early hours of the morning while taking a break from other academic work, so it is not as polished as it could be. Adding an 'Open' button to launch a link in a new tab sounds like a useful feature. I will consider this for the next update. Thank you for the feedback!

Firefox has a neat feature for this; if you right click an iframe, it'll have a "This Frame" menu with options including "Open Frame in New Tab".

That... seems like a good thing!

17 + 11 URLs from https://dahlstrand.net/wander/wander.js + 26 URLs from https://www.siddharthagolu.com/wander/wander.js that I link to from the above link. So 54 URLs so far.

The number of URLs grow as more people add this tool to their website and add each other as neighbours. The tool is capable of discovering neighbouring consoles and showing URLs from there.

This looks like it depends on Javascript for interactivity, which by design isn't possible on Gopher/Gemini.

The drkhsh.at website does not allow itself to be embedded in another website:

  $ curl -sSI https://drkhsh.at/ | grep -i frame
  x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN

See also a similar discussion here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/issues/3

There is also a note in the project README requesting console owners to be mindful of this while adding links: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#caution

My problem is I didn't understand what this was, refreshed the page and lost what i was reading to the ether.

[dead]

I kind of want webrings but with federated OIDC. I.e. you can create an account at any of the sites and re-use the login on the others to leave comments/add content. This has to exist in some neat package right?

It is StumbleUpon over again.

Sorry to know it did not work in your browser and thank you for reporting the problem here. If someone is able to reproduce it and share details either here or at <https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/issues>, especially which JavaScript features are not working, I would be happy to update the code.

I am aware that I have used a number of relatively modern features. For example, I suspect `for ... of` might be one, and perhaps `Element.append()` (instead of `Node.appendChild()`) could also be an issue. Unfortunately, I do not have old browsers to test this reliably, so any help in identifying the exact constructs or functions causing problems would be very appreciated.

Hello @superkuh, if you happen to revisit this, could you let me know which browser and version you were using? It would help me decide how far back I should support.

Yes, I am not sure how I managed to mess up the project name. I have emailed the moderators to ask for help in fixing it.