I've built a city, now it needs residents!

Greenwich, an experiment in collaborative links

Sep 27, 2024

Howdy! This post has gotten some extra attention (by our standards). As such, if you are installing Greenwich (thanks!), you should know that you must highlight a sentence on a webpage and then right click to add a suggested link as a superscript. You may see an error saying not all required fields are filled out otherwise. Greenwich v2 is coming, but for now we hope you enjoy the (hopefully infrequent) endearing bugs of V1 every now and then.

You can install Greenwich here

Message me on Twitter for any bugs, feedback, etc

Jake

A secret city, hidden in the internet, begins construction

Over the last two weeks I’ve been constructing a secret network of subway stations throughout the internet. Catching one of these secret trains takes you from one interesting webpage to another, you simply need to board when you happen upon it.

But not everyone can board these secret internet subway cars, you need the right Metrocard. That card, is Greenwich, my new app.

All aboard - a call for internet pioneers

So far, it’s just been me building these secret subway stops. Now I need you, other curious internet explorers to come be a part of Greenwich!

Residents of Greenwich can discover and contribute related links for any webpage on the internet. And only Greenwich residents have the ability to see these secret stations. In fact, this post has several, you just can’t see them (yet).

In this way, all Greenwich residents help grow our shared map of interesting places to visit and benefit from it.

Let me give you a sneak peek of how it feels to be a resident of Greenwich.

The way we discover interesting websites needs innovating, why not let anyone contribute to any webpage?

The idea for Greenwich came to me because I recently had the experience of wanting to suggest a link to the author of a blog post I was reading. I happened upon a sentence which reminded me of a different blog post I thought they’d enjoy and wanted to link it right there.

I wanted to be able to add a hyperlink to a webpage I didn’t own and I wanted future visitors of that page to see the suggested link I added, in line, right at the relevant section rather than buried in the comments.

I also wanted to stumble on a cool blog post and see that another curious reader had been there before me, and better yet, left me a portal to another interesting piece of reading that explored related ideas. I wanted the websites I visit to feel visited, alive, bustling. The only places that really feel that way today are the social media sites like Twitter and Instagram and as we all know, not always in a good way.

Isn’t it sort of insane that Twitter is the default place for discovering interesting links? Sure we have Reddit, Hacker News, and a few others but there has been very little experimentation in social features outside of Social Networks. We have our Times Squares, now it’s time for more West Villages.

So bring on the collective footnotes, the community superscripts!

I am calling this idea collaborative links. It’s like crowdsourcing recommendations, rather than using some algorithm.

Not in pursuit of “Truth” (like Wikipedia or Twitter’s Community Notes feature), but rather to harness the interestingness stored in other internet explorers’ heads.

A shining city upon a server - your invitation to make the internet more interesting

Now this exists and it’s called Greenwich! It’s free and ready for new residents. We’d be honored to have you.

The earliest Greenwich residents will be pioneers, helping build the culture of our new internet city. What essays, blog posts, and websites do we want connected to our subway system? We get to build it out from scratch.

At first, Greenwich will only have a few stations, and they’ll be rare. But over time, as more people come to Greenwich, our stops will proliferate and stretch out across the internet. Spotting a Greenwich station will eventually be a normal part of walking the web. There will be dense downtown areas of the internet and suburbs and quaint villages — and there will be trains connecting them all.

For now, we have Central Station, which lists all the current routes within Greenwich. As more people join, this will hopefully become a reliable source of fascinating related links. My dream would be to have anyone reading this as an internet neighbor. The internet crowd around here is the exact type of resident that would make Greenwich great, curious and full of interesting recommendations.

Come discover and build a growing network of secret subway stations, connecting our residents from one interesting webpage to another.

a final note: I am strongly considering open sourcing Greenwich and would love to chat with anyone who has run a successful open source project to learn from you!

Thanks,

Jake