I got a little notification because a link in this discussion thread had been clicked a lot and I figured I’d go see how that LLM-heavy webring hosting project was going… and it’s gone. I’d only checked back occasionally after writing the OP in that thread, and it didn’t seem to me that many people were making use of this service, as there were only a handful of mostly empty webrings. The last time I checked I think the most popular webring had four members, so perhaps it wasn’t taking off and that’s why the proprietor ended it - perhaps we will never know. Just another odd chapter in the great story of the small Web, come and gone.
Yeah I didn’t feel like it went anywhere. Shame. I had a webring of one there, but felt it was always tough to try and grow without any sort of focus behind it.
a webring is a rather simple script to make. in my case is literally just a php script and a toml file that lists the members (yes json is better for this but I wanted to try and parse toml data and it stuck)
form those who don’t know how, there are many other well-established services like onionring.
so idk what was webring studio even trying to do. i never heard or them to be honest
Onionring is popular but it’s a bit fiddly to maintain in that you have to add all sites manually to a JS file. It is missing basic functions such as marking sites as linkless or dead. This also goes for the one remaining webring hub, webri.ng, though it’s missing some even more basic features, such as re-ordering websites - very annoying when you need to temporarily remove a site if it’s down, and then re-add it in its old place. Can’t be done.
So if you want a nice feature complete webring that makes it easy to add and edit entries, currently you have to host your own and the ones with those features are written in PHP or some other programming language that isn’t supported everywhere (most notably Neocities and Nekoweb).
So there is a space for a webring service, I think. It’s not for me either, as I like running as much as possible in the secure heartland of my server, but I think there’s definitely a niche for it.