Yet another districts replacment idea

[rhenn]

I've been thinking about this the past couple of days, so I'm curious of what people on here would think.

I like the idea of districts. I think it was cool to be able to find sites by topic - that way, even if it wasn't the site's only focus, it was a good jumping off point to look at other sites (if that makes sense). Obviously there were limitations - drama etc aside, sites were (if I recall correctly?) limited to only one "district", and people weren't able to easily make changes to their site in the list.

The idea I had was similar to districts, but with a couple of different features. First, there'd be some sort of search function. The main motivation for this is I want an excuse to write another one that different websites could be pushed. Having some kind of random sort feature would mean that whenever someone searched e.g. 'art' different sites would appear at the top, meaning that people would be able to discover more/different sites without having to scroll through a massive A-Z list.

Correspondingly, websites could have multiple 'tags' instead of being limited to a single 'district'. This means if someone's site has a wide range of stuff they could have an arbitrary number of tags. I think it would also be good to make it easier for people to change info about their website on the directory, if e.g. they changed the content of their site.

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Obviously a massive consideration for this would be a.) curation of websites and b.) maintaining the directory. For curation I think a bare-bones minimum would be fine (e.g. "has a homepage with some kind of writing or image beyond 'under construction'") without being too restrictive.

In terms of maintenance; maybe having it open-source would be helpful? That way anyone interested can contribute code, and hopefully the directory would be updated regularly.

Obviously this doesn't cover everything, and I've probably missed something obvious, but what are people's thoughts on this? Do you think it would be a good (or even feasible) idea? Do you have any suggestions?

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

Obviously this doesn't cover everything, and I've probably missed something obvious, but what are people's thoughts on this? Do you think it would be a good (or even feasible) idea? Do you have any suggestions?

As I said somewhere else: I'm a big fan of every curation that is independent of the big tech companies :). I also think that the idea to make it open source is a good one.

[varve]

Curation would also have to include a basic level of "do the tags match the site contents?" to prevent the inevitable keyword spamming. I imagine that's why neocities limits you to 5 tags.

It's an interesting idea! I looked over the neocities districts site when I first joined, but my site sort of bumped against multiple districts and didn't fully belong in any, so I never submitted my site to it.

[wetnoodle]

I love this idea! Idk if this would work in practice but maybe to prevent keyword spamming there could be a way for registered users to vote per tag whether each site fits? And i love the open source idea but either way I'd love this!