Introducing Ringspace: A proposal for the human web

I'm tired of the internet getting worse. There's a real risk in that sentiment of wallowing in nostalgia. Yes, it's true: I grew up on dialup—early dialup, no less. I remember my father struggling to pull down images via Mosaic on a 14.4 modem. I remember MUDs. I remember the high drama of AIM away messages. I remember Livejournal.

Having established my elder millennial bona fides, I want to make clear that the worsening of the internet is not just because things are different from what they were. The promise of the internet—access to knowledge and people from around the world—is slipping away. We all know Cory Doctorow's word for it. I don't particularly like it because the signifier now oversimplifies the signified. We're living through something far more dangerous than the constant worsening of products. The very integrity of our knowledge is imperiled.

I won't relitigate all that. You can read my warnings here if you like.

If we accept that the web we know and love is disappearing, and that the future holds nothing but a sea of slop unless we act, we can begin seeking solutions. There is some sense in looking to the past for answers, if it is something from the past we wish to reclaim. I'll speak for myself. I want a human web, where I have reasonable expectations that what I read was written by a person, not a model. I want a web of creativity and passion. I want what this network was always supposed to give us, and what the tech industry has reduced into a cheap commodity: connection.

There's an old idea that serves this function well. I think it's time to bring back webrings.

If you are too young to remember them, webrings were a simple idea: gather a bunch of websites with a shared focus; link them together in a sequence; the last one links to the first one. That's it. Things were simpler. Even the concept of a certificate to verify a site's chain of trust was a long way off.

Trust undergirded the whole system, even if it wasn't technical trust. Webrings operated on good faith and mutual assurance that the members of the ring would create work that benefited all community members—readers and ring members alike. That is a form of trust, one that is in desperately short supply on today's internet.

I wonder: could the mold of a webring be modernized with modern trust concepts to serve the purposes of a human web? What might that look like? I've been thinking about it a lot.

In fact, I've been thinking about it for five months now. Since I couldn't get the idea out of my brain, I built a thing.
Introducing Ringspace

Ringspace is a proof-of-concept for how we might modernize the webring concept to provide a reasonable amount of trust within a small human community of creators. It attempts to provide readers of sites with a guarantee that the site is a) who they claim to be, and b) in good standing in the community. With a simple CLI and an accompanying browser extension (and a little asymmetric cryptography), the webring model blossoms into a trust model suitable for small to medium-sized communities.

That scale is part of the design. Ringspace rings are not intended to be internet-scale. How could any circle of trust truly be that large?

I'll let you all read the details on the project documentation. This is by no means perfect, final, or production-ready. But it demonstrates how we might apply a little humanity to our technology to recapture what we've lost. The internet can be a force for good. We can bend the network to our will. We just have to try.

Oh, and as always, no AI was used in the creation of Ringspace.

Let me know what you think! I'm eager to see how this idea grows.

taggart-tech.com/ringspace/