A while back on fedi I made a series of call to action posts I titled "The New Yahoo". With so many people opting to make their own websites and blogs in the wake of Cohost's closure, I want to share it here.
The New Yahoo Post
Some time ago I floated a concept I called #NewYahoo. I want to put this idea out there again. It's not a new or unique idea, but I really want to explain my thought process behind how I see it.
As I've posted a million times, search is irreparably broken. Finding solid information about a topic is harder and harder. I think the only way we can fix this is to go back to relying on human curation.
The Yahoo model (not unique to Yahoo, but it's a relatable example for people my age) was having a directory of websites based on topics. You go to the anime section, you get links to various anime websites. There wasn't an infinite slop of fake blog results.
Now, I know some directories like this still exist, or are being made, and I think that's great! But actually, #NewYahoo, a name I pulled out of my ass just to get some people thinking about it, is kind of a misnomer. Because what I am proposing right now is NOT that. It's a little different. My guiding philosophy here is that if our goal was to build a New Yahoo, we are going to spend all day discussing the best way to code the site, the best way to run it, how to deal with submissions, etc...and right now the internet house is on fire. We can't be thinking of elaborate solutions, webrings vs wikis vs whatever, we need to be getting everything out of the burning building FIRST. We need to be gathering what resources we can while we can still try to find them, or still have them in our bookmarks, or still remember URLs.
So my proposal was, and still is, simple. Do you have a personal website? Or just anywhere you can share some links? Make a page full of links to resources for things you care about. Even better, include dead links if they can be accessed via Wayback, because a search engine sure as hell won't give you those, and information is information. Then link to other people's lists of links. And don't just link to their list of links, steal the links your list doesn't have yet. Redundancy is vital here because you don't want useful links to just be in one place or you have problems again if a site goes down. But it's still good to link to their lists in case they add new things later. Make a giant interconnected web of resources and get the word out in spaces you're in for those topics that you've got a wealth of information gathered, and encourage others to do the same. Basically like a decentralized webring in a way, where no one person has to be maintaining it.
My own page, where so far I've only been gathering useful PalmOS sites so far, is here as an example: https://d-shoot.net/resources.html
We can argue all day about how to make this kind of project, how to make a meta site that hosts all of these link archives or whatever. But right now we need to get our links out of the burning building that is the modern internet. That's the focus, and that's what I hope I can encourage more of you to do. And with this being fedi, I bet a lot of you already are doing this! And I bet the ones that aren't yet are sitting on a goldmine of actual usable information, and that's becoming more and more scarce. Let's get our information out there!
What That Means For You
If you have just made your own blog because Cohost is closing, make a resources page. Link to any fucking useful page you can find about some topic you care about (in my case I linked to a ton of PDA related pages). Link to other people's blogs too. Just flood the thing with links. Because search is only getting worse, AI is only getting worse, and you can't find anything useful anymore. Even stuff that seems obvious, do it. Even if sites go down, the links are still useful because of the Wayback Machine (my resource page links a few defunct sites that you can still Wayback tons of good info on, and I only found those links due to other people's link roundups from decades ago!).
I'm sure there's 50 new projects springing up right now around webrings and directories and whatever, and that's great, I'm not at all discouraging Projects(tm). I'm just encouraging direct immediate action to preserve information and connections that literally all of you making a website right now can take very easily, because waiting around for a perfect system to be built means we're losing information by the day.
