I Built a Webring. Yes, On Purpose, in 2026.

TL;DR: I built a webring. Sites point at each other, readers walk the circle, no company sits in the middle taking a cut. It has one member so far, which is me, and the seat next to you is free.

A webring is a circle of websites that agree to point at each other. That is the entire technology. It was everywhere in 1997, it died when search got good, and search is not good anymore.

So I built one. It currently has one member, which is this site, which makes it less a circle and more a guy standing in a field. That part is fixable and I will get to it.

The mechanism, which is almost stupidly simple

Every member puts a small badge in their footer. Three characters: a back arrow, a mark, a forward arrow. A reader finishes something on your site, hits the forward arrow, and lands on the next member’s site. That site’s badge sends them to the next one. Eventually the ring comes back around to you.

No account. No login. No script running on your page watching anybody. The badge is plain HTML that would still work if every server I own caught fire, because all it does is point at an address.

When somebody clicks it, a small router at the edge looks up where you sit in the list, finds your neighbor, and forwards the reader there. That whole trip takes about as long as it takes the browser to decide it is going somewhere.

Why bother, when this is a solved problem

It is not a solved problem. It got replaced, which is a different thing.

Discovery used to be humans pointing at other humans. Blogrolls, rings, “here are some sites I like.” Then search got good enough that pointing at each other felt redundant, so everybody stopped, and the pointing got centralized into a handful of companies who now decide who gets seen. Those companies have since filled their own results with generated sludge and started answering questions directly so nobody has to click through to you at all.

Meanwhile the platforms that inherited the audience started charging rent. You built the following, they own the pipe, and every year the percentage of your own people who see your work goes down unless you pay.

A ring has no pipe to own. There is no rank. There is no impression to sell you. A reader on site four goes to site five because they pushed a button, and nobody in the middle takes a cut or decides they would rather show them something else.

It is a worse system in every way except the ways that matter.

What we do not care about

We do not care whether you used AI to make your work.

The indie web crowd has largely decided this is a moral line, and rings and directories over there will ban you for touching the tools. I think that is a category error. A machine did not decide your piece was finished. You did. Nobody asked whether Ginsberg used a typewriter.

What gets you rejected here is not tools. It is a site that exists to farm clicks, with nobody home behind it, publishing volume nobody read before it went out. You can spot it in about nine seconds and so can everybody else.

The line is whether a person cared. That is it. That is the whole vetting standard, and I will apply it by looking, personally, one site at a time, for as long as that is possible.

What it costs

Nothing. There is no paid tier, no upgrade, and nothing to buy later. I am not building a directory business, and if I ever start charging for a seat you have my permission to be extremely rude about it in public.

You get a listing on the members page with a link search engines follow. You get readers arriving from the sites on either side of you. You keep your list, your site, and your readers, and if you want out you delete three lines of HTML and nothing else of yours breaks.

I get the same thing you do. That is the arrangement. It only works if it is even.

The honest part

There is one member. Me.

A ring of one is a mirror, and right now the arrows walk a reader to a page that says as much. I am not going to pad it with my own subdomains to make the number look better, because you would notice, and because a directory that lies about its size at launch is going to lie about other things later.

So it starts empty and it starts honest. If you make something and a person made it, the seat is free and the instructions are at nicheof.one/noo. Write to me and I will look at your site myself.

If you do not have a site yet, that is the actual problem to solve first, and I have opinions about that which mostly amount to: own the thing, keep it cheap, do not rent your audience from anybody.

I have no idea if this works. Webrings died once already.