Project 1998 - Surfin' the Web

[FrodoSwaggins]

By now you've heard of Project 2025, which has solemnly sworn to feed future generations into the protein swamps of Mars as sustenance for the squid lords. Now, no matter how you may feel about this, I'd like to set that aside for a moment so that we can talk about something near and dear to my heart: Project 1998.

Project 1998 is an effort to leverage fundamental data exchange techniques implemented during the 1980s and 1990s to provide a number of technological alternatives to the technorati or mag 7 set of large technology conglomerates that have taken our data and online existence hostage today. Or in less technical terms,

Project 1998 represents the best of what made the 1990s internet great, with modern content and thoughtful updates, presented as a robust and semi-portable alternative to some of the privacy-violating, POV censoring online platforms of today.

Facebook? Nope, forums. Messenger? Insta? How about Signal and log-free chats on a private server instead? Google? Bing? Webrings are back, baby! Viva la Internet Index!

That's right, our initial goals are:

1. Practical, individually hosted content that doesn't rely on a single platform or point of failure.
   
2. Webrings, the HTML linked sort, that help users to explore related content and navigate to new websites, without the use of social media or a search engine.
   
3. A search engine based on relevancy, not recency, which is navigable using a search box or drill down, with a manually updated index that cannot be manipulated by site owners.
   

Here's just a bit of what we envision, cribbed from a familiar source:
   

However, I would be so bold as to say we might consider: 
   

Here are some of the resources we'd like to ensure remain available to others via our work (insomuch as if they are still up, users can find them):

1. Project Gutenberg, with callouts to specific works - https://www.gutenberg.org/
   
2. Standard Ebooks - https://standardebooks.org/
   
3. Wikipedia - https://www.wikipedia.org/
   
4. Wictionary - https://www.wiktionary.org/
   
5. Wikivoyage - https://www.wikivoyage.org/
   
6. Wikimedia - https://commons.wikimedia.org/
   
7. Wikibooks - https://www.wikibooks.org/
   
8. Wikinews - https://www.wikinews.org/
   
9. Wikidata - https://www.wikidata.org/
   
10. Wikiversity - https://www.wikiversity.org/
    
11. Wikiquote - https://www.wikiquote.org/
    
12. MediaWiki - https://www.mediawiki.org/
    
13. WikiSource - https://www.wikisource.org/
    
14. WikiSpecies - https://species.wikimedia.org/
    
15. WikiFunctions - https://www.wikifunctions.org/
    
16. MetaWiki - https://meta.wikimedia.org/
    
17. WordNet - https://wordnet.princeton.edu/ - This service appears to be a hot mess, sadly
    
18. Oxford English Dictionary - https://www.oed.com/
    
19. Concordance to the Bible - https://www.biblestudytools.com/concordances/
    
20. Qur'anic Commentary - https://www.altafsir.com/Index.asp
    
21. Resources for Study of and About Quran - https://libguides.brown.edu/Islam/Quran_Hadith
    
22. The Catholic Encyclopedia - https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/
    
23. Concordance to Shakespeare - https://archive.org/details/aet2858.0001.001.umich.edu/
    
24. Almanacs - https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/we...rldalmanac
    
25. US Military Manuals - https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/FM.aspx
    
26. Some sites with public domain classical music - https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/loc-jukebox-jazz/use/
    
27. Archive.org
    
28. Archive.is
    
29. Library websites across the board - Here's a great start https://libguides.rowan.edu/c.php?g=618536
    
30. Government websites, especially ones that host publications
    
31. Open Source Textbooks - https://oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks
    
32. The Panama Papers - https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/
    
33. Russiagate - https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/07/who-w...a-problem/
    
34. Human Rights Council - LGBTQ Terms https://www.hrc.org/resources/glossary-of-terms
    
35. Human Rights Council - https://www.hrc.org/
    
36. Annie E. Cassie Foundation LGBTQ Definitions - https://www.aecf.org/blog/lgbtq-definitions
    
37. The Matthew Shephard Foundation - https://www.matthewshepard.org/
    
38. The Murder of Emmett Till - https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-ri...mett-till/
    
39. Emmett Till - https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/emmett-till
    
40. College & University Websites, 1900 listed here! - https://searchenginesmarketer.com/compan...lege-list/
    

Right now, the focus is on making sure that vulnerable groups targeted by Project 2025 and the Trump regime, as well as the researchers that support them, can still find resources that are available online without exposing themselves through Google, Meta, and other embedded tracking systems. Or, at least not via search.

Other features to be added:

1. Each search result to have a link to archive.org or archive.is, or  both, as a mirror in case the original is down. 
   
2. Potentially, run a script monthly to submit URLs in the index to a mirroring service (not us).
   
3. Citizen / community based weather on the homepage, just because Project 2025 is defunding NOAA and we're not going to have accurate weather if this keeps up. Also gives people a reason to visit the search engine.
   

The internet of yesteryear was glorious and it can be again. Don't believe me? Just look at this still live URL from 2000!
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/trave...4-6-0.html

Please respond to this message with any feature requests or lists of URLs you feel should be included.

[FrodoSwaggins]

I need to go through the contents of this, but GitHub Awesome Lists are definitely good inclusions in the search engine.

https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

[FrodoSwaggins]

Something else I would like to suggest, let's make the search engine an answer engine. No AI though! I propose a huge text file with random facts listed one per line. The facts are displayed with search results, I'm response to relevant keywords (common words like how to, the, they, those, etc excluded).

There are various collections of facts, such as:
https://github.com/anfederico/fact-bot/b.../Facts.txt
https://github.com/visnkmr/Factset/tree/master

I like this one that purports to be all 1000 Snapple facts:
https://gist.github.com/emctague/c47bea7...53aec31edc

There's also the Oxford English Dictionary as a text file, which I find deeply alluring:
https://github.com/sujithps/Dictionary/b...ionary.txt

There's also a facts API which I don't recommend that we use, but which is interesting since it's 125,000 facts!
https://www.api-ninjas.com/api/facts

[gorzek]

Adding this here:

• Transworld Express - https://transworldexpress.org/wiki/Main_Page - Resources for transgender people looking to emigrate from the USA.
  

Also I plan to get the basic version of this up today.

This post was last modified: 02-09-2025, 11:55 AM by gorzek.

[gorzek]

And it's up: https://weliveinhell.net/1998/

I still need to add the links. But we've got a starting point.

[gorzek]

I've added 1-15. What I will probably end up doing is putting the YAML file in a GitHub repo and let people contribute to that, then automatically update the hosted version whenever the repo updates.

[gorzek]

Just to follow on some from what @FrodoSwaggins said: I believe our current environment threatens to topple the Internet as we know it today. Today's Internet is overly consolidated, overly complex, overly brittle. Here's a couple stats for you: in 1995, before the Web broke out, 14% of adult Americans were on the Internet. By 2000, 46% were online. Almost half. Most websites were still using pretty basic HTML and CSS even then. To me, that proves there was a lot of utility even when the tools available were quite primitive. Sites were primarily text with some images. Video was still clunky and subpar (remember RealPlayer?) and so people mostly made do with words and pictures.

This is certainly a slower, more deliberately-paced way to aggregate information, but that's the goal.

I'll put as a note here that accessibility needs to be a major element of this. A lot of modern website design is not accessible, filled with hidden elements, images without alt text, etc. By keeping it simple, it should also be straightforward to keep accessibility features front and center. I am not an expert on accessible design at all so anyone advice anyone has in that regard would be very much appreciated (and any useful links on that will surely go into the index.)

[gorzek]

We've added a bunch of links as well some new features.
Check it out: https://weliveinhell.net/1998

[gorzek]

OK, I think I have screwed with this enough for today.
Please, go check it out and have fun. I may have gotten a little unhinged here.