Removed by mod

This is basically the concept of a Webring, and used to be big. Some were fixed (as in the path through the ring was always the same), but some were more flexible or random or semi-random.

A decentralised approach would be new, and not necessarily too hard since the dataset for each ring would be small, so each member could just store all or a subset of the entries in their ring and submit updates to their “neighbours” in the ring that’d eventually spread out to everyone. The challenge is moderation - you’ll still end up with some entities that have a privileged position to weed out bad entries, because the appeal was always to a large extent to make discovery “someone else’s problem” and the moment you let someone put links on your site someone will try to abuse it.