themed blog discovery
Riffing on Hacker News' Ask HN formula, Case's Ask BEAR: Is there a way to find dev blogs on Bear? reminded me of neighborhood directories. Dead or alive web hosting services like GeoCities, NeoCities, and others would have a central directory of sites thematically organized into named neighborhoods. Examples of these directories include:
- The Geocities Gallery, which showcases "A restored visual gallery of the archived Geocities sites, sorted by neighborhood."
- Neocities Districts, a seemingly dormant directory that initially served Neocities, but moved off-site according to the Neowiki's Neocities Districts page.
- NeoCities Neighborhood Directory, which appears actively maintained.
Could a community effort toward building a neighborhood directory solve Case's issue of not finding themed posts efficiently? If so, how well could it work on other platforms and formats too, no matter how aligned with social media they are?
Then again, viable alternatives already exist:
- For blogs, ooh.directory categorizes them by topic and sub-topic compared to the neighborhood approach.
- Evan's Scour casts a wider net, offering a personalized feed of your very own based on free-form interests and curated sources.
- According to IndieWeb Wiki's webring entry, "a webring is a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure". Their page shows a list of active webrings you can check out and possibly join.
- Speaking of webrings, Marv recently shipped webring functionality on his blogging platform, paperboat.website. Discover the public ones on the platform's Public Webrings page.
What other initiatives am I missing that could solve Case's dilemma without reinventing the wheel? Reinvention isn't bad per se, but you may already have the answer for him and others, if not yourself too.
Update: Sylvia shared these initiatives that you may find useful for themed blog discovery:
- Fran maintains a list of TTRPG blogs on Bear.
- Moxie's linklings.club describes itself as "a directory of people with personal websites organised by specific interests".
- Bear Blog founder, Herman, recently improved the discovery feed's Search page to search the full text of posts.
- People can tag their posts with Octothorpes, like this one for Bear blogs, then have them show up in the tags directory. Each tag has its own page and can be followed via RSS too.