Internet search sucks now.
Making a classic "search engine" requires obscene amounts of money and resources, so creating direct competition is not a realistic option.
But what if we had a way to each take our own personal bookmarks and link collections, and share them, using a federated protocol?
My fifty sites, your sixty-five links, some friends and their contributions... All hand-selected and vetted, manually tagged and organized by real people... Hosted on small, volunteer-run servers...
What if web search results were organized not by "how many ad dollars did this site generate for the search company" but rather something like "someone you know directly tagged this site, and someone twice-removed tagged this other site so it's lower priority"?
@mordremoth i think “federated protocol” might be overengineering this; you could do it with a simple fetch protocol that scrapes public relationships 𝑛 layers deep
this is in fact the idea behind FOAF <https://web.archive.org/web/20220518003509/http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20140114.html>; downsides include :—
• relationships must be public (otherwise it’s not possible to know about people “twice‐removed”)
• people need to actually bother to take the time to publish links and relevant metadata
• you need a hosted version for people who don’t manage their own websites as well as tools for making the above ergonomic for people who do
@mordremoth oh, and
• links/recommendations must also be public (for the same reason as relationships)
you could maybe get around this by automatedly just updating your own restricted‐access profile with a cached version of all of the recs of all the people you know (and they know, 𝑛 layers deep) so that people who have access to your profile don’t know WHO recommended something, just that they did (and the degrees of separation), but this massively complicates the technological implementation (every website needs to have a scraper built‐in) and there’s no protection against someone just leaking your information anyway
