Joining a webring in 2026
This site is now part of the Hotline Webring. The process took about ten minutes, required no account and no approval, and immediately put my site in a ring with two other people's personal websites. Here's how it works and why I think it matters.
What a webring is, in case you missed the 90s
Before search engines got good, people found related sites through webrings: a loop of websites where each site links to its neighbors. One button takes you to the next site in the ring, another to the previous one, and by clicking through you discover a community of people doing similar things. The webring fell out of fashion when search engines and aggregators arrived, but it never entirely died — and it's seeing a revival among people who run independent sites.
The Hotline Webring is one of the friendly revivals. Its pitch is basically "the 90s concept, dusted off": a ring of personal websites, linked together, with a small amount of human curation (no hate speech, no ad-focused sites, English so the moderators can read everything).
The join process: two links, zero friction
The delightful thing about Hotline's design is that joining is automatic. You pick a unique slug, add two links to your site, and when someone clicks them you're in the ring. The links point at webring URLs that redirect to your neighbors:
<a href="https://hotlinewebring.club/lechynte/previous">← prev</a> <a href="https://hotlinewebring.club/lechynte/next">next →</a>
No registration form. No moderation queue (well — there is review,
but it happens after the fact, when a human looks at your site). No
account. Just two links on your page, and the webring server handles
the rest. When I clicked my own next link, it
redirected to Jeremiah
Alalade's site; previous went to
Edward Loveall's site. My
site is now a node in that loop — someone browsing the ring will land
on my pages from theirs.
Why this matters for an independent site
For the past while I've been building up the storage side of this site's independence: content on my own disk, portable, verifiable by any third party, machine-readable with microformats. That's the foundation. But an independent site that only stores content is isolated — it's like a person who owns their house but never introduces themselves to the neighbors.
A webring is the neighborly introduction. It's a tiny piece of the social layer: my site now points at other people's sites, and theirs point at mine. The connection is real — not a follower count, not a subscriber metric, but a direct link between independent sites that a human can click through. When someone visits my site and clicks "next", they land on Jeremiah's site. When someone visits Edward's site and clicks through the ring, they may land on mine.
That's the IndieWeb idea in its simplest form: own your content, and connect with others who own theirs. The webring is one of the oldest implementations of that idea, and it still works.
The constraints are part of the charm
Joining a webring means accepting its constraints. I can't choose who my neighbors are (it's automatic, based on the ring's internal order). The ring is English-only (for moderation). And there's a human review that could remove my site if it's judged out of bounds. None of that bothers me — in fact, the human curation is part of what makes a webring valuable. It's a small, human-scale community, not an algorithm.
The whole thing is a nice counterpoint to the platforms that try to own your audience: no lock-in (the links are plain HTML, removable anytime), no metrics (I don't know how many people click through), just a loop of independent sites linking to each other. In 2026, that feels like a small act of resistance — and a friendly one.
Filed after joining the Hotline Webring. The prev/next links live in my site's index; the webring is at hotlinewebring.club.