Docs
What Is This?
Octothorpes are hashtags for websites — creating simple, meaningful connections across cozyweb spaces. Octothorpes are way of extending an old-school webrings into RSS feeds, and discovering stuff you can care about.
Each Octorhorpe surfaces it's own RSS feed and JSON API endpoint. Discover new things and watch ideas grow.
How It Works
- Register your domain with the Octothorpes community.
- Add the `TXT` record to your DNS to verify that it's your domain.
- Check back to see when your domain is approved. We'll email you if you provided a contact address.
- Add a link on your website to an #octothorpe:
<TKTK>someThorpe<TKTK>
1. Registering a Domain
Octothorpes is opt-in, and requires registering your domain with the server. This is how we keep track of relationships, and gives is a opportunity to enforce our community standards. Octothropes is about community, and community only works with active moderation. Registration helps us weed out bad actors, spammers, and shitheads.
2. TXT Record Verification
Octothorpes has no authentication or access control systems. Instead, we just ensure that whoever registered a domain actually controls that domain. By adding a TXT Record to your DNS provider, we can make sure that a websites owner is the one who wants to contribute.
3. Domain Approval
A human being looks at every website that wants to contribute Octothorpes. If the site goes against our community standards, we don't allow them to contribute. If your website is chill, we'll greenlight it and add it to our list of sites.
4. Octothorpe Links
To contribute, all you have to do is add a link to the #octothorpe to your web page.
<TKTK>
octothorpe
<TKTK>Why Tho
Search is broken, social media sucks, and finding good stuff on the internet is hard now. Building new ways of connecting our websites to each other can start to work against the logic of the personal, social, always-on feed of constant updates. Octothorpes is a new way to tend the garden of the internet. It's a collective, meandering, slow river that you can watch roll by.
Prior Art
Lots of things have informed the creation and application of Octothorpes, documented on mmmx.cloud.