This tool is inspired by Kagi Small Web (recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410542). A common concern raised here is that Kagi Small Web currently accepts only blogs, comics and YouTube channels. It does not accept arbitrary small websites. That limitation motivated me to build Wander.
Wander is fully decentralised. Anyone can host it on their own website. It consists of just two files: an index.html for the Wander console and a wander.js where you link to other Wander consoles. It is a bit like a webring, but more flexible. Each console can link to any number of sites and other consoles.
There is no server-side code, no database, nothing to install. If you have a website, you can set it up by uploading just two files. In fact, you can host it on GitHub Pages or Codeberg Pages too.
If you like the idea, please join the network. I would love to see it grow.
I hope platforms like these find a way to attract people outside tech circles. I looked at around a dozen recommended sites and only two of them isn't the personal website of someone who works in tech and writes mostly about tech, which gets boring rather quickly.
There is a world of non-tech bloggers writing stuffs about history, culture and nature who would likely never learn about this project simply because they are not in the right social spaces. I hope there is a way to have them in the ecosystem too.
Very cool. Reminds me of stumbleupon, which I lost many hours to back in the day.
Curated discovery is one of biggest gripes with modern platforms like youtube - discovering something truly new and outside of your normal interests is really difficult, and the same goes for the web. If you have a topic you want to explore it's fine, but finding random things you'd never have thought of yourself is much harder.
I love this as a concept. The wander button is great, but it still needs some curating to decide what pages you like, and getting to the actual content. I guess I'd like to know the workflow moving forward? Just re-download the repo every couple weeks, and diff to see what new sites are on the list?
Before webrings and the very first directories and search engines, the tools for exploring the web were memory, bookmarks and the links sections of web sites.
Love this, but I need it to allow me to break the frame. I found some neat sites, but I need a button to open them in a new tab, frame-free, if I want to.
The StumbleUpon comparison is apt but I think what made StumbleUpon work was the social layer: you could see what your friends upvoted, and that created an implicit filter against the pure randomness. Pure random discovery is fun for a session but gets old. Would love to see something like a lightweight trust graph here where a site vouching for other sites carries weight, similar to how Webring worked but with signal about quality rather than just affiliation.
Cloudhiker.net has been doing this for a while too. Great to see more grassroot-ish attempt at expanding the web (or i guess more accurately returning it to its purpose)
I don't know how useful this is, but I am getting
tired of Google and co ruining the world wide web
how it once was. Something has to be done. I have
no idea whether this here can be of help or not
but the more people think about this, the better.
Otherwise the quality will continue to degrade.
89 comments
This tool is inspired by Kagi Small Web (recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410542). A common concern raised here is that Kagi Small Web currently accepts only blogs, comics and YouTube channels. It does not accept arbitrary small websites. That limitation motivated me to build Wander.
Wander is fully decentralised. Anyone can host it on their own website. It consists of just two files: an
index.htmlfor the Wander console and awander.jswhere you link to other Wander consoles. It is a bit like a webring, but more flexible. Each console can link to any number of sites and other consoles.There is no server-side code, no database, nothing to install. If you have a website, you can set it up by uploading just two files. In fact, you can host it on GitHub Pages or Codeberg Pages too.
If you like the idea, please join the network. I would love to see it grow.
More details about how it works and how to set it up here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#readme
There is a world of non-tech bloggers writing stuffs about history, culture and nature who would likely never learn about this project simply because they are not in the right social spaces. I hope there is a way to have them in the ecosystem too.
Curated discovery is one of biggest gripes with modern platforms like youtube - discovering something truly new and outside of your normal interests is really difficult, and the same goes for the web. If you have a topic you want to explore it's fine, but finding random things you'd never have thought of yourself is much harder.
Throwback to the StumbleUpon days.
It is a project I keep postponing lol