Seizing the means of discovery

A few days ago I read this great piece about web directories, and it got me thinking. Then it got me coding.

It’s getting harder to find good “stuff” out there, because the tools that we’ve relied upon to help with that have become increasingly worse over time. Between algorithmic manipulation, advertising, and making AI a front-and-center component of the search experience, trying to discover great websites—tools, information, games, you name it—is becoming more frustrating every day.

Information flows freely in an open and social web, and I find that I discover a ton of really neat things through blogs and fediverse feeds. But these moments of discovery are ephemeral: blink and you’ve missed them. And then you’re back to having to use flawed search mechanisms to try to find them.

The early web directories were born out of necessity, because alternatives (search engines) didn’t exist yet. Today, the alternatives often leave us disappointed. There’s an interesting irony in the idea that web directories could maybe serve as an alternative to the alternative, not just bringing us full circle, but maybe bringing us back to where we should have stayed all along.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been building url.town, an indie web directory for omg.lol members. It’s far from perfect (or finished), but it’s live! I’m hopeful that this is one way that we can catalogue and more easily find links to all kinds of things. By taking a moment to drop a URL to a cool site when you come across one, you’ll make it that much easier for folks to discover that same cool site later. And in this way we can seize the means of discovery, moving it far from the algorithms, AI, and advertising that run rampant everywhere.

url.town literally just hatched. As of right now, there are only a handful of links there added by a few testers. So, yeah, it looks kind of lame at the moment. Maybe you’ll help make it less lame? The experiment could also flop entirely. I’m excited to give it a chance, though!