The system they run on is called Octothorpe Protocol, or just OP. OP can do a lot of social web stuff with basic html, like make and join webrings, build dynamic blog rolls, or make backlinks. And you can subscribe to almost everything you can do with OP via RSS.
Octothorpes has been live for about a year, so you may have seen them out in the wild before, especially if you were part of Weird Web October. But we just released our first stable version, which added a lot of the new fun stuff, like webrings.
This is a 100% volunteer, open-source project right now – we just want to build something useful that could contribute to the human-made internet we love. We’re building our roadmap to 1.0 right now, so we’re all ears if you have suggestions.
32-Bit Cafe and the cool sites y’all make are a huge inspiration to us!
oh yippee!! i thought octothorpes were such a cool idea in weird web october last year, i’m so glad you’ve done more stuff with them! congrats on the release
Wow it feels good to get a “yippee!” Thank you. Cool that you were part of Weird Web October. We really loved it last year and hope we can help make it fun again if it happens again this year. Just reached out to Jay about it.
Thanks! Happy to answer any questions if you have them. I’m planning to make a super short “here’s how to get started” video soon too if that’s helpful.
I’m interested in giving this a shot, although I’m not sure which tags or pages of mine to start with.
Are you using anything in particular as spam prevention? Is there any way for a moderator to remove a mis-used tag/page, or is this working on the honor system for now?
Great question! We have a couple mechanisms in place to moderate abuse and a few more planned. Right now there’s a form to report anything you feel is against the server’s ToC. And the API allows you to exclude domains or terms in the feeds you create if there are any sites you personally don’t want to see results from. That will become easier to use as we build out more UI tools. Commercial usage is pretty much on the honor system right now. Luckily everyone’s been very chill and no one has tried to spam the network. But we do have plans to add very clear commercial usage guidelines which will require any commercial use to carry a specific flag that will exclude them from feeds by default – so you will have to opt-in to see commercial posts. Of course, it’s up to who’s running the server to decide whether to implement or enforce that (so there may very well be commercial-by-default servers in the future), but we plan to keep the main server focused on non-commercial sites.
For future reference, if it comes up again, there’s a new-ish security setting on Neocities that is blocking the normal way of pinging our servers. The fix is simple. The standard method is to add <link rel="preload" as="fetch" href="https://octothorp.es/?uri=https://YOURDOMAIN.COM/PATH/TO/CURRENT/PAGE"> to the head of your page.
If you run into the Neocities bug (seems not to be an issue on older sites), you can just replace the as param value with image instead of fetch. Neither case involves loading anything onto your page, it’s just a very lightweight way to ping our servers.
This is such a cool idea and a cooler execution! I love it. I’ve gone back and tagged my blog posts through 2023 with Octothorpes.
Mostly just tried to use the more general tags from my blog and leave out the more personal ones. I.E. “American Girl” or “dolls” but not the specific doll names. I dunno if I’ll find anyone else on the tags I’ve created but it’s worth a shot!
i loved following the weird web october octothorpe via RSS last year, and i’m excited to do it again! related, the link to that feed (and JSON API) aren’t as easy to find now that the #wwo page is pretty long. my suggestion is to display those links before the list of pages, instead of after.
another suggestion/question: does the protocol have any way to automate dead link checking? right now, the list of domains includes 35 sites on glitch, which ended hosting on july 8th. having almost a quarter of the links 404 makes it feel a bit like a ghost town…
Awesome! I see yr on Bear, which is great, but if you wanted to increase your chances of finding other related posts, you could post to the main server, octothorp.es, too. I added instructions for doing that and pre-cleared you on the main server so you don’t have to register.
So glad you enjoyed the feeds – I found it pretty magical to see new sites show up every day. You are very right about the feed links being lost – I am chagrined to see that the issue I made for that is approaching its first birthday. But we have some UI improvements planned for WWO (including that) and will probably make a home page or blog post of sorts with resources just for WWO.
Good point on the Glitch domains. We should clear those out. I think I avoided doing so because it makes me a little sad to see them go. Automated deletion is a little rudimentary right now, but we’ll have some background housekeeping like that in future releases.
I’ve wanted to comment on this thread for a bit. This is very cool and feature rich. There’s a lot here I need to Absorb as someone above mentioned, but I’m very fascinated by it. The webring feature is especially interesting. I want to toy with it. I’m excited to see this project grows
Hey there, I thought I did what you told me to make my octothorpes post to the main server, but they don’t appear to be doing so. Not sure what I did wrong. This is what’s in my header:
This is what’s in my header: