Click Here for Somewhere Else: How the Webring Came Back and Why It Still Works

The Button at the Bottom of the Page

Scroll to the bottom of a certain kind of website, one with a serif font and a hit counter and a page called about me that hasn't been updated since March, and you'll find it: a small graphic, maybe 88 pixels wide, glowing in colors that no brand designer would sign off on. Next to it, two words. NEXT SITE.

Click it. You land on somebody's fan page for a 1970s synthesizer. Click again and you're reading a retired librarian's notes on local graveyards. Again and a person in Ohio is explaining, at length, how they rebuilt a 1994 radio.

That's a webring. It is an old idea, it is not a metaphor, and against all reasonable expectations it is growing again in 2026.

What a Webring Actually Was

A quick history, because it's genuinely strange. In the mid-1990s, a programmer named Sage Weil built a service called WebRing, which let anyone with a homepage create a circle of related sites. Each member pasted a small navigation bar onto their page, and visitors could move forward, backward, or jump to a random member. It worked because the web was small and links were how you got anywhere.

By the late 1990s there were tens of thousands of rings: rings for cat owners, rings for Star Trek fan fiction, rings for amateur astronomers, rings for people who collected airline timetables. Yahoo bought the whole thing in 2000. Then the search engine ate the link economy, the platforms ate the homepages, and the rings fell into disrepair. Most of the old navigation bars sat frozen on abandoned pages like porch lights in an evacuated town.

The revival started as a subculture of a subculture. Neocities, the hosting service that reads as a tribute to the GeoCities era, gave people an easy place to put a hand-built page. The artist-run Hotline Webring connected personal sites with a shared aesthetic and a shared allergy to platforms. When the well-known Yesterweb collective wound down in 2023, some of its members kept the plumbing running in smaller, less public forms.

The People Running the Rings Now

Ask around and you find the same profile over and over. Someone in their twenties who never used the original web, or someone in their forties who misses it, and often both in the same ring.

The operators are hobbyists with a spreadsheet and a shared maintenance burden. They review applications, which is the whole point. A ring is curated, not crawled. The rejection rate isn't high, but there is one, and the criteria are usually some version of: is this a personal site with a person behind it, and does it load without five megabytes of tracking scripts?

Rings now cover the expected niches (retro computing, zines, birdwatching, cassette culture) and some you wouldn't guess (state-level weather observers, people documenting their own home renovations in agonizing detail, a group of librarians cataloging the contents of small-town newspaper morgues). Theme matters less than scale. A ring of eleven sites that all know each other is the goal. A ring of 4,000 is just a search engine with extra steps.

The 88x31 Button Is Back and It's Fine

The badge culture came back with it. Those little rectangular graphics, 88 by 31 pixels, were the semiotics of the late-1990s personal web: NETSCAPE NOW, MADE ON A MAC, THIS SITE IS ANTI-FRAMES. New ones circulate now, hand-drawn in a pixel editor, some of them funny, most of them sincere in a way that is slightly embarrassing and mostly charming.

Guestbooks came back too. The technology is unglamorous, a hosted form and a text file, but the social function is the interesting part. You show up on a stranger's site, you sign the book, you say something real. There's no reply count to farm. The internet spent twenty years inventing engagement metrics, and the guestbook quietly does the same job without any of them.

Where the Good Stuff Hides

If you want to find it, you have to change your habits, because none of it is surfacing for you. Recommender systems don't index the small web, and the small web doesn't want them to.

A short field guide:

• Start at a ring's index page and walk the circle in order. That's the intended experience. The sequence is the content.
• Hit the random button on purpose. Serendipity is the feature, not a bug in the design.
• Use the small independent search engines that actually crawl personal sites, like Marginalia and Wiby. Searching for a feeling works better there than searching for a keyword.
• Follow blogrolls. A person who reads good things will tell you what they read, if you scroll far enough down.
• Subscribe to RSS. Every good small site still has a feed, and a reader full of feeds is the single biggest lifestyle change available to a tired scroller.
• Sign the guestbook, but only if you actually have something to say.

Why a Badly Made Site Feels Better

There's a technical reason and an emotional one.

The technical one: a personal page loads in a fraction of a second, doesn't ask you to accept cookies, and doesn't shift its layout three times while you're reading. It was built by one person for a reason they could explain.

The emotional one is harder to say without sounding like a greeting card. When you click NEXT SITE, another human somewhere chose to put that link there. There is no algorithm in between guessing at your appetite. Somebody in a room decided this was worth connecting to, and that decision is the only reason you're reading it.

The rings will probably stay small. That's the point. The old web was never huge; it just felt that way because you had to go looking, and the looking was half the fun.