Moonjump

[nafnlj]

This one popped up in my referrer logs today:

https://moonjump.app/

Moonjump collects links from Marginalia, Are.na, and Hacker News. If you click on the planet, it takes you to a random page. It also has a search box. At first I thought the search box would bring up search results, but instead it sends you to a random page based on your search query. The search is the part of the site which is powered by Marginalia.

It is also open source, see on GitHub: https://github.com/ya1sec/moonjump

[Yukinu]

Very interesting, I'll have to add a bookmark for this.

I took a look at the source code, particularly the public routes and some of the are.na APIs since I am not too familiar with are.na (came across it briefly last year, but couldn't make heads or tails of it at first glance, so shelved it for later research).

Which source do you think the referrer came from, Marginalia I'm guessing?

Also, for anyone interested in testing out the different jumps, here are all the links:

* All sources: https://moonjump.app/jump
* HackerNews: https://moonjump.app/hn
* Are.na: https://moonjump.app/arena
* Marginalia (via search queries): https://moonjump.app/search?query=yukinu

[nafnlj]

> Which source do you think the referrer came from, Marginalia I'm guessing?

I think it was most likely came up on a jump thanks to Hacker News. My reasoning:

1. 5 of my articles made Hacker News page 1 in 2021 and 2022, and two of the five had enough "points" that they appear in all of the Hacker News curators.
2. I think that the vast majority of people who use Moonjump "jump" instead of using the search box. If someone used the search box, it is possible one of my articles would come up since I am well indexed by Marginalia. But Hacker News seems like the more likely candidate.

I have no way of knowing for sure though. When I say referrer -- I mean it was picked up by my very basic local analytics plugin as moonjump.app. The plugin only captures some referrers, not where they go (it also doesn't catch all -- for example Marginalia and most Fediverse projects do not appear as referrers). Sometimes I can match an unusual referrer to specific articles, but it is only one click.

> I am not too familiar with are.na (came across it briefly last year, but couldn't make heads or tails of it at first glance, so shelved it for later research).

Same... I only learned about it because my first Hacker News adventure led to someone saving one of my articles there. My impression was: "Pinterest, but for articles instead of random pictures." Seems like it has a decent enough free plan but I didn't see a use-case for it, so did not investigate beyond poking around to see what it is for. I may try some are.na jumps to see what kinds of articles are shared there.

[Yukinu]

A site I found from an HN moonjump: https://craigmod.com/ridgeline. It's a blog series by a writer in Japan who is walking around Japan and documenting some of the things and places that he sees while on the walks.

I think it was most likely came up on a jump thanks to Hacker News. My reasoning:

1. 5 of my articles made Hacker News page 1 in 2021 and 2022, and two of the five had enough "points" that they appear in all of the Hacker News curators.
2. I think that the vast majority of people who use Moonjump "jump" instead of using the search box. If someone used the search box, it is possible one of my articles would come up since I am well indexed by Marginalia. But Hacker News seems like the more likely candidate.

I have no way of knowing for sure though. When I say referrer -- I mean it was picked up by my very basic local analytics plugin as moonjump.app. The plugin only captures some referrers, not where they go (it also doesn't catch all -- for example Marginalia and most Fediverse projects do not appear as referrers). Sometimes I can match an unusual referrer to specific articles, but it is only one click.

I took a look at the source again, the HN jump picks 1 of 3 categories (top stories, best stories, and new stories), and the API returns 500 results, so definitely could have been from HN, essentially anything posted on there has a 1/1500 chance of being the jump (newstories), increasing to 3/1500 if it hits the front pages (topstories and beststories, although I'm not sure what the difference is between the 2).

Code: Select all

class Hack:
	def __init__(self):
		self.base_url = 'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0'
	
	def random_category(self):
		"""
		Returns a random category.
		"""
		categories = ['topstories', 'beststories', 'newstories']
		return random.choice(categories)

Same... I only learned about it because my first Hacker News adventure led to someone saving one of my articles there. My impression was: "Pinterest, but for articles instead of random pictures." Seems like it has a decent enough free plan but I didn't see a use-case for it, so did not investigate beyond poking around to see what it is for. I may try some are.na jumps to see what kinds of articles are shared there.

I'll try a couple more are.na jumps, see if I get anything interesting.

[nafnlj]

Re; Ridgeline: This blog looks good. I'll add it to my RSS reader. I am all for good walking content with photos.

Are.na: I made about 25 are.na jumps. The results are tech-inclined, but not nearly as much as your typical high-performing Hacker News posts. I did run into quite a few dead links and sites (somewhere between 1/2 out of 10). Some interesting ones:

• https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/8.0.x/ (an old version of a project site for creating CLI interfaces)
  https://iamtired.online/typing/ (dramatic site about being tired online... uses Google Tag Manager)
  https://webdevelopm.net/hunter/index.html (Hunter College programming course syllabus)
  https://justafork.online/ (Buy a fork)
  https://poor.dev/blog/terminal-anatomy/ (Well-designed page on terminals)
  https://www.jacopocolo.com/books/Radical.mycology.pdf (An entire book about mushrooms -- PDF)
  https://12bytes.org/articles/tech/firef ... _Lists_tab (uBlock Origin guide I have studied to inform my filter choices)
  https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-edi ... ommunities (Long essay on online communities)

I can see stumbling onto some interesting things with are.na jumps. For example, I would have appreciated the uBlock O article if I didn't already know about it, and I landed on two other books in addition to the mushroom book linked above. But the flip side of Are.na is that I get the impression people use it more to save articles that are interesting to them rather than to share with others -- so you get forgotten dead links, pages about buying forks, and course syllabi. Fun to poke around but I'll venture Hacker News and Marginalia-based jumps are more likely to turn up sites to add to an RSS reader.

[Yukinu]

Some more sites I found with moonjump:

• https://webring.xxiivv.com/
  • A webring for hand-crafted wikis and portfolios
• https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/Standards.html
  • A W3C post by Tim Berners-Lee from 1997 about methods for future proofing your HTML documents (it's a short post, he mostly just says to stick to the standards and avoid proprietary HTML extensions)
• https://daniel.haxx.se/irchistory.html
  • A brief history of Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

I'm getting quite a mix of different results from the arena jumps, one jump took me to an ytube video, another jump to a PDF file on poetry, and another jump to tumblr's media domain with an image of what looked like an ad for an art exhibit.

https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/8.0.x/ (an old version of a project site for creating CLI interfaces)

I actually know of this site, the dev originally created the Flask web framework (I use it for a couple of side projects).

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-edi ... ommunities (Long essay on online communities)

I have a bit of a collection of these essays about early internet and web communities. Haven't read one yet from the perspective of the art community. Some quotes from the essay:

The first publicly available browser, Mosaic, came in 1993. It allowed images and text to load in a single window, and the masses joined in navigating the wild early web.

Actually the first publically available browser was www by Tim Berners-Lee. There were also graphical browsers before Mosaic, however Mosaic quickly became the most popular browser and was available on Windows, Mac, and Unix systems.

Van Baarle, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram, expresses exasperation at the platform. “It’s about posting bite-sized content as frequently as possible,” she said, in order to game the algorithms that choose what followers see and reward frequency with more visibility. She also noted that it is tempting to post simpler artworks to Instagram. “Most social-media platforms don’t reward the extra time and effort that goes into [detailed digital paintings] anymore.”

This is why large social media sites have very low quality content (low signal to noise ratio). Quality takes time and often many iterations of refinement.