Links

[erlend-sh]

We want this in Weird:

https://blog.erlend.sh/evergreen-content-gardens

links is effectively a 'Weird primitive'. linktree style link additions for profiles will already be the v0.1 of 'Weird Links'.

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All you need is links

https://subconscious.substack.com/p/all-you-need-is-links

I think this article can serve as a core design tenet for Links in Weird. It's filled with guiding principles that align perfectly with the core 'game loop' of our social-links system.

You don’t need stars, hearts, upvotes, downvotes, you just need links

Social media, search, spam, recommendations — when faced with an abundance of information, we often find ourselves needing to separate wheat from the chaff. Many systems reach for stars, hearts, upvotes, and downvotes as quick fixes for user-generated quality signals. But what if we just used links?

Inbound links can be used as a signal of quality. People are more likely to link to things that matter, and less likely to link to things that don’t. Sum up the backlinks to a page and you have a quality signal. This is the key insight behind Google Pagerank.

You don’t need comments, you just need links

Comments are one of the core interaction primitives of today’s web. I can comment on your Facebook post, your Google Doc, your blog.

What is a comment? What is its structure? What is its function? It’s a bit of content that is conceptually related to a parent post. We could say that the comment points to the post, or something in the post. That’s a directional relationship.

Links also point to something. They describe a directional relationship. It’s not much of a leap to consider an inbound link a comment on the thing it links to. If we implement some form of transclusion, we can express comments in terms of links. In fact, WordPress already does this with Pingbacks.

Curated collections for example is nothing more than a list of links.

To be clear though, the add-ons mentioned above (likes, comments etc.) can definitely be useful and should probably find their way into Weird. However, they should all be solved for by pure linking first so as to push the link-graph to its limits.

https://sheep.horse/2024/4/save_the_web_by_being_nice.html

sharing links is nice 💖

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Preliminary thoughts

Importers

• We will support channel-links import from Discord, like this: feat: discord bot (closes #55) raffomania/linkblocks#61
• GitHub Awesome lists
• Bookmark Managers

Misc

• https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
• https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/13/give-people-something-to-link-to/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954879
• https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23865484
• https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/the-subversive-hyperlink/
• https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/cool-urls-mean-something/
• https://tedium.co/2024/07/23/linkedin-complex-linking-schemes/
• https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/examples-of-great-urls/

[erlend-sh]

Example Link Lists

Kindly add your suggestion in a reply below! 👇

[erlend-sh]

Coops

• https://tech-coops.xyz/
• https://directory.platform.coop/

[erlend-sh]

https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List

[erlend-sh]

Topic: Horizontal scaling

• Horizontal Scalability polyphony-chat/symfonia#28

[erlend-sh]

Make a web page:

• https://htmlforpeople.com/
• https://solarpunk.cool/zines/web-zine-01/

[erlend-sh]

https://sdk.blue/

[erlend-sh]

Ranking Lists

This #28 should have an accompanying Ranking List. The page would be titled ‘Alt-web login priorities’

The list would have two sections (i.e. headings, another concept we’ve yet to specify).

First section will be the apps already listed as TODOs in #28, with the same heading (or maybe we rename both to Planned).

Second section will be titled ‘Tentatives’. This is an exhaustive list of every small/open/indie app that could be supporting Weird for logins.

While the first list is static (editable by managers only), the second list can be reordered at will. However, as will be clearly marked, only the top app-links you’ve placed in the top 3 count as votes for which apps you think should support Weird-login as soon as possible. Any additional ordering you do is purely for your own clarification.

1st place is 3 votes
2nd place is 2 votes
3rd place is 1 vote.

With 20+ rank-lists submitted, the main page would have a top 10 of highest priority integrations, ranked by most vote-points.

Page branches

I don’t know if this is the best way to put it, but the individual rankings that happen here are each a sort of branch from the main page. The main page is essentially running a function of ‘display a mass-merged aggregate of all my branches’.

[erlend-sh]

Links graph

Every link that is added to any page (profile or project) in Weird gets added to the network-wide ‘links graph’. A web-public links aggregator would live at e.g. weird.one/links

Prior art:

https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
https://github.com/raffomania/linkblocks
raffomania/linkblocks#44

The links index would note stats for each link like:

• number of backlinks
• number of occurrence in people/project’s lists
• …

Open questions:

• Is every link also its own linkspage? That seems like the easiest way to also