DeGoogle Yourself

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

True, but these things can also be used by us, to curate/maintain a high quality link collection. However, I'm not sure 'pages' will be read by humans in 5 years, so I have a feeling we wont need such a collection anymore. Well, not for humans but probably for our individual LLM's.

@ajsadauskas @degoogle Curlie https://curlie.org/ is the continuation of the ODP

Reddit and Lemmy are supposed to be what you want: link aggregators.

We're supposed to link to sites and pages and people vote on how good they are in the context of the sub community topic.

Of course, then Ron Paul happened, and now it's just memes and Yank politics so... maybe deploy Lemmy and turn off comments.

@ajsadauskas @degoogle i encountered https://aboutideasnow.com/ recently

it's not exactly what you describe and remember, but it's... at least real.

i was reminded by this post of my days from like 1998-2001ish on About.com (RIP)

@ajsadauskas @degoogle it sounds a bit like Kagi‘s Small Web initiative and search. have you seen it? https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

I used them and contributed to links as well - it was quite a rush to see a contribution accepted because it felt like you were adding to the great summary of the Internet. At least until the size of the Internet made it impossible to create a user-submitted, centrally-approved index of the Net. And so that all went away.

What seemed like a better approach was social bookmarking, like del.icio.us, where everyone added, tagged and shared bookmarks. The tagging basically crowd-sourced the categorisation and meant you could browse, search and follow links by tags or by the users. It created a folksonomy (thanks for the reminder Wikipedia) and, crucially, provided context to Web content (I think we're still talking about the Semantic Web to some degree but perhaps AI is doing this better). Then after a long series of takeovers, it all went away. The spirit lives on in Pinterest and Flipboard to some degree but as this was all about links it was getting at the raw bones of the Internet.

I've been using Postmarks a single user social bookmarking tool but it isn't really the same as del.icio.us because part of what made it work was the easy discoverablity and sharing of other people's links. So what we need is, as I named my implementation of Postmarks, Relicious - pretty much del.icio.us but done Fediverse style so you sign up to instances with other people (possibly run on shared interests or region, so you could have a body modification instance or a German one, for example) and get bookmarking. If it works and people find it useful a FOSS Fediverse implementation would be very difficult to make go away.

@ajsadauskas @degoogle definitely something o be thinking about. More and more I’m using my followed hashtags, mastodon lists, and links to resources other people provide rather than just finding useful things in search results. But the big gap is still when I want to find quality info on a new topic. Cannot trust any of the damn results searching for how and how often to clean my kid’s new aquarium, for example. So much LLM and SEO crap info.

I had this exact thought earlier today. Either curated directories, or a ground-up, vetted search engine that only pulls from pre-screened sources.

Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, and of course Yahoo all were originally web directories of this sort.

Both Wikipedia and my own memory disagree with you about Lycos and AltaVista. I'm pretty sure they both started as search engines. Maybe they briefly dabbled in being "portals".

@ajsadauskas @degoogle I guess the problem though is how you make sure they are actually maintained by a human acting in good faith. The way community Facebook groups meant to be for this kinda thing get spammed by likely fake businesses doesn’t give me hope