Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web

Hello HN!

This tool is inspired by Kagi Small Web (recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410542). A common concern raised here is that Kagi Small Web currently accepts only blogs, comics and YouTube channels. It does not accept arbitrary small websites. That limitation motivated me to build Wander.

Wander is fully decentralised. Anyone can host it on their own website. It consists of just two files: an `index.html` for the Wander console and a `wander.js` where you link to other Wander consoles. It is a bit like a webring, but more flexible. Each console can link to any number of sites and other consoles.

There is no server-side code, no database, nothing to install. If you have a website, you can set it up by uploading just two files. In fact, you can host it on GitHub Pages or Codeberg Pages too.

If you like the idea, please join the network. I would love to see it grow.

More details about how it works and how to set it up here: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander#readme

I hope platforms like these find a way to attract people outside tech circles. I looked at around a dozen recommended sites and only two of them isn't the personal website of someone who works in tech and writes mostly about tech, which gets boring rather quickly.

There is a world of non-tech bloggers writing stuffs about history, culture and nature who would likely never learn about this project simply because they are not in the right social spaces. I hope there is a way to have them in the ecosystem too.

Very cool. Reminds me of stumbleupon, which I lost many hours to back in the day.

Curated discovery is one of biggest gripes with modern platforms like youtube - discovering something truly new and outside of your normal interests is really difficult, and the same goes for the web. If you have a topic you want to explore it's fine, but finding random things you'd never have thought of yourself is much harder.

Before webrings and the very first directories and search engines, the tools for exploring the web were memory, bookmarks and the links sections of web sites.

I love this as a concept. The wander button is great, but it still needs some curating to decide what pages you like, and getting to the actual content. I guess I'd like to know the workflow moving forward? Just re-download the repo every couple weeks, and diff to see what new sites are on the list?

I want to like it, but I don't fully understand why one wouldn't just put a bunch of links on a /wander page and maybe randomize the order?

This is really great! But my work day is ruined now.... Already found so many interesting things.

Love this, but I need it to allow me to break the frame. I found some neat sites, but I need a button to open them in a new tab, frame-free, if I want to.

Cloudhiker.net has been doing this for a while too. Great to see more grassroot-ish attempt at expanding the web (or i guess more accurately returning it to its purpose)

Wow this is amazing! The experience and resulting websites are very refreshing. I feel inspired.

Throwback to the StumbleUpon days.

We're inventing stumbleupon from first principles.

I love the idea. One small thing - Ran into a problem almost immediately

--

Nightly Can’t Open This Page

To protect your security, drkhsh.at will not allow Nightly to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window.

https://gist.github.com/ryankearney/4146814

It includes only 17 URLs: https://susam.net/wander/wander.js

Have you considered including Gemini and gopher support? There is a very nice small web community there.

Really neat. Immediately added to my own small blog: https://hugo0.com/wander

So, is this a meta-webring, that allows for showing individual sites but also sites that show other sites?

Oh, that's neat. I think to really understand it though I'll have to explore it and experiment with hosting my own Console.

Seems like a perfect addition to any links page.

Would it be possible to create a list of sites with a Wander?

Awesome it’s hosted on codeberg too

So is this web rings all over again?

cool,I like this

This is really cool, I think the idea here is fantastic!

This will get really fun when influencers get a hold of the idea and start connecting themselves into the Wander community.

I get an infinite loop of checking my connection and the page reloading, making it difficult to navigate back. Is this some kind of scammy site?

This is actually pretty cool. Once I have my own personal webpage, I may even add this tool to it.

It is a project I keep postponing lol

So like StumbleUpon

It would be cool if the javascript were re-written a bit to only use standard long existing javascript features so one didn't have to run a modern corporate browser to use the "wander" functionality. It did not work in my browser even with JS enabled.

Delightful!

Looks cool. Good job!

I don't know how useful this is, but I am getting tired of Google and co ruining the world wide web how it once was. Something has to be done. I have no idea whether this here can be of help or not but the more people think about this, the better. Otherwise the quality will continue to degrade.

Cool idea - it’s like a recommended set of links, but integrated into an interface like stumble upon or Kagi’s small web browser

Ahhh... this is like my OneRandomSite.com from... 2006 or so... nice.

I think we need things like this. To be reintroduced over and over.

love it!

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Tangent but wow codeberg is not blocked by the Great Firewall?

this is more nuanced than the title suggests. worth reading the whole thing

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Title is wrong, isn’t it Wander?

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