[Imustaskforhelp]

> cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too

Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.

But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.

Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.

I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?

Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?

I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.

[robinsonb5]

I've had a vague idea rattling around in the back of my brain for a while now, for some kind of endorsement system using public keys and signatures, so I can apply an endorsement to a particular site (perhaps with some kind of hash of the content so that it expires if the site changes), and get recommendations from others doing the same. When visiting a new site I can see a reputation score based on how many people have endorsed it and how much overlap there is between me and them. Users would also be able to endorse each other, and exclude either other from the algorithm, too - so hopefully networks effects would form organically around topics of interest - and more loosely between topics.

[Imustaskforhelp]

archive.org + website + linkhut search + username? (Endorsements can work by having the link of ln.ht profile itself being part of another user's Linkhut profile)

For example: Suppose you went to fluxer.gg (Open source Discord alternative that I found cool)

You searched it upon ln.ht: https://ln.ht/?query=fluxer.gg

You can then find the username who uploaded it there (in this case, its me): https://ln.ht/~imafh

You can then for example, find another thing that I uploaded there about a song/musician that I found really cool :-

Fuji Gateway - Tuesdays, Am I Right? (Official Lyric Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjb_0RW28c

You can even endorse me by having my username linkhut be within your linkhut profile for example and I think I am seeing some social aspect of it in the frontpage of linkhut as well although I don't particular appreciate that right now.

Linkhut also is open source/have public API's

I found Linkhut only yesterday fwiw but its really cool and want to vouch for it. So does this work for the use case that you are mentioning?

Plus another point about Linkhut which I have talked in another comment is the note functionality. It allows me to reason (why?) I liked a particular website of say any project or any person and allows me to add words to it as well. This might be the feature I like the most because it allows me to use words to sort of actually have word-of-mouth for any cool things that we find on internet.

And this way you can also find reasonings for other websites that a person may've vouched for in a way too. I found this whole idea really elegant.

Edit: Oh btw there is also the concept of tags. So suppose you wanted more discord alternative. You could search #discord and it can for example lead you to stoat, matrix etc. from other people too.

I am not sure if there is already an extension that does it but an extension could be made to really simplify some aspects of it. I definitely feel this and there is some maybe small community on linkhut so you're not starting from scratch and also the merits of linkhut in general seem to me be good enough for average person to use.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.

[robinsonb5]

It sounds really good - though obviously less automated than what I had in mind. What's needed is something with less friction - which could be achieved using a browser extension - but also needs something to prevent shilling and other forms of abuse. (Or, more to the point, a method by which any user who shills can be easily canned by other users.)

[Imustaskforhelp]

> though obviously less automated than what I had in mind. What's needed is something with less friction - which could be achieved using a browser extension

Yes, I completely agree with that but I suppose making a browser extension (for linkhut) is infinitely easier than the previous attempt and something which is more easily doable There is already an extension which can do the first part of adding a website into linkhut simpler (its named linkput[0]) for firefox and its open source. had to search it up.

> but also needs something to prevent shilling and other forms of abuse. (Or, more to the point, a method by which any user who shills can be easily canned by other users.)

I am not quite able to think of what you mean by that but I do think that there are some ways to do it but its a problem that internet faces at large of abuse in general and its a careful line between privacy and abuse.

That being said, I am happy to help you find this cool project haha :D

I think that if you build something like an extension for linkhut, it would be interesting so good luck with making that hopefully! Glad I could help.

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~silasjelley/linkput

[robinsonb5]

> I am not quite able to think of what you mean by that but I do think that there are some ways to do it but its a problem that internet faces at large of abuse in general and its a careful line between privacy and abuse.

My main goal is that my deciding that someone's recommendations aren't valuable to me should only affect the recommendations seen by people with similar interests to mine. There's not as much objective truth about what's valuable content and what isn't as many people would like to believe: I have no interest in seeing some influencer-led product recommendation but my niece very well might want to see that. Meanwhile she'd have no interest at all in some deep-dive into TMDS signalling and TERC4 codes!

My gut feeling is that, if we could get that system right, it would effectively "shadow ban" (for want of a better term) anyone whose content you don't want to see - but just for you and (to a lesser extent) those who hold your recommendations in good standing.

(I should also mention that my original idea here wasn't so much about discovering new stuff as getting an at-a-glance idea of whether a given page has high-quality content or just low-effort surface-level SEO-farming slop - in an age where the former is being drowned out by the latter.)

[dekken_]

sounds like a anti-block list ;)

[dekken_]

> as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y...

I gravitate toward what I consider authenticate/consistent people which for me at least has seemed to work out as I also try to be that way.

> Can you have a linkhut profile...

It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.

as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.

[Imustaskforhelp]

> as for https://ln.ht, I can see it working for some people, but personally I think there's a bit too much going on, sensory overload.

I do understand the sensory overload aspect. I personally don't use the social aspect of it that much.

Essentially the idea that I want to say was that even the people that I follow (say on bluesky) etc. sometimes I don't know why I follow them exactly either or any idea of giving this info to the world for that matter.

The idea of linkhut interests me especially with their note section: I can have a profile of cool things/people I found and I can share it to world and I can try to explain the "why cool?" so that people can judge things on that aspect and it gives more info, that's all.

Unfortunately even for fediverse/ all social media. You really can't end up writing the exact reason you follow someone as a comment everytime you follow someone. Sometimes sure but not always and those comments can get muddled up with other comments that you write while using the platform itself.

> It doesn't really work that way, you can see other peoples public conversations to see how they interact, as a metric for their personalities, which, might be more work. It's network effects moreso.

I suppose so. But I think the idea to me for using something like linkhut isn't for people to offload searching how people interact/the metric as you mention but rather the fact that we are unable to find these people/products in the first place!

There has been too much stuff going on in the world in social media that there are genuinely cool people/projects that you don't even see. My point is similar to outlinks in the sense of sharing some visibility to those who don't have such visibility in the darkness of internet sometimes.

I only sort of found it yesterday so but that's my take on it. I am curious to hear yours though.

[immibis2]

Like this one: https://www.immibis.com/outlinks/

IDK about Linkhut. Why should I use a whole SaaS to manage a single page list of links?

[Imustaskforhelp]

Outlinks are great too. It's just that I have found it easier with Linkhut and yea.

Linkhut is open source and seems nice to me that's all.