#web rings

I remeber visiting GateWorld quite a bit some 20 odd years ago. I was a huge Stargate fan and this site and forum, along with a couple of webrings and email groups was one of my regular Internet hang outs. I didn't really know any other fans in real life, other than my sister and she was living the other side of the country as I'd moved out. And because I'd moved out TV packages were not in my budget and shift work meant I couldn't always catch the episodes as they aired anyway! So I used to save up for the DVD box sets and my sister would occasionally send me a care package of episodes she'd recorded off the TV on VHS. (Just typing that out made it feel like a lifetime ago!)

But I have to admit that as life got more complicated, esspecially over the last decade, I forgot about the site, and even my DVD collection got put in a box as I moved around for work, uni and career. I stopped with making fanart, gifs and fanfic or taking part in lenghty episode discussions and at the time of it airing, speculation on the next season. However thanks to it being available on Amazon Prime I did go through a full rewatch a few years ago, helped me get through a very long commute to work! But I was certainly no longer an active participant of the fandom online, not even lurking the old haunts.

So the other day when I wanted to check on some Stargate rumors my first instinct was to check GatrWorld. Howver the screenshot here is what I was presented with when going to the site on mobile (using Edge with the built in "block intrusive ads" option on.)

I appreciate that server costs need to be covered somehow but this made the site unusable! I spent far too much time trying to find the right close button on things without clicking on the ad and therfore taking me away from the page that I wanted. But then as for actually reading anything on the site as soon as I clicked to another page the ads all appeared again!

Things like this make me miss the Internet as it was back in the early 2000s. Fansites were more personal , content was curated by webrings and instead of social media pages people had their own sites. Through the years and the rise of social media apps the Internet, for me at least, lost its sense of community not bound by physical location.

I think Kurzgesagt did a good video on this topic a short while ago, and talked about going back to the smaller online communities that grew more organically around shared things rather than the algorithm driven "town square" style we have now with socials.

This is also why this post is here, a reminder that this weird site - though I guess a social media company these days - still fosters that gathering around shared interests as the main goal for the most part.

I'm working towards joining the "Knitting Blogs" web ring AND put in my request for a Ravelry invite. But now I'm feeling a bit insecure about my knitting progress and whether my blog belongs on these sites. Maybe I'm spending too much time on other folks' blogs but there seem to be no intermediate knitters on the web. Everyone out there is working on amazing projects and getting so much done. When I finally get my Ravelry invite --

You signed up on June 28, 2007

You are #11501 on the list.

4233 people are ahead of you in line.

9872 people are behind you in line.

33% of the list has been invited so far

-- I'm hoping it will help me to get organized and improve my crafty productivity. Until then, the blogosphere is a lonely place for us newbies. (boo hoo!)