cohost support

if you're not a million years old, let me just explain what a webring was: it was a list of websites that linked to each other, and on each home page you could find  "this webpage is a member of the minidisc users club"

and you'd get little "previous" "next" and "random" buttons that would let you browse other member's websites.

nostalgia aside, i think a little group membership style thing would help people find the accounts and posters they're interested in. i've already seen numerous "are there any other photographers here?" "what about ham radio?" style posts, so i'm pretty sure there's a need

here is a rough sketch of how i imagine it would work:

• i start a group, i give it a name, and i am automatically a member
• i send out invites to other people to join the group, and other people can request to join the group too
• for any groups i am a member of, i can choose to show it on my profile page, under my avatar and bio
• perhaps most importantly, i can click "next/prev" and browse through a bunch of different member's cohost accounts, looking for fun chosts

there's some extra fingagling, if I click next to go to someone's page, but they haven't opted in to showing the ring, then i might be a bit stuck. it might be better to put a little banner at the top of the page when i'm actively clicking through members, like a ?from_ring=uuid,  so the menu is in the same place. i'm unsure.

it might be best to only go 'back/next' from members who opted in to having it on their profile, but the little menu bar at the top might be useful regardless.

what order should webrings show on your profile? is it per-user or is it alphabetical? or the order in which your joined them?

also, it might be difficult if there's twenty "photography" webrings. should the groups share the same namespace as account names? should they be free form text entries? again, i'm unsure

should it be possible to merge a webring? the answer is "no because someone will merge it into a lol you're owned webring"

as you can see, it isn't just a "lol get it done" feature, there is some planning to be done, but i do really like the idea

Love this idea! A thought I have reading through this is I could imagine a model where you have "public" and "private" webrings

"Public" webrings could work sort of like a universal tag. Like there aren't 15 "photography" webrings, just one. Anyone can opt in, anyone can opt out. As the site gets bigger these are useful still but kind of huge

"Private" webrings on the other hand would be unique and have some amount of moderation. There could be three "PhotoPals" and not anyone can join. This could be useful for smaller communities or explicit organization. Like imagine a game dev team decided to have Cohost as their primary method of communication, so they have a private webring "StudioNameDevs" where people can discover/browse the Cohosts of all the devs without it being clogged up by fan accounts.

Now how that moderation (who can join) would work, not sure. The webring could have an owner, the webring could vote on new Cohosts joining, could be multiple options. I just have a feeling that level of "smallness" will be useful as the platform grows

I humbly suggest "eggring" as the name for this feature