You can solve a ton of social problems with technical solutions.
100 different, easy to integrate internets federated across a number of different communication technologies and protocols is actually very hard to regulate and capture.
Sure, you won't have another Facebook, but we children of the 70s, 80s,and 90s would ser value in that.
I have wondered if a pseudo-social / pseudo-technical solution of some sort of trust graph could help.
Like you would say who you think is credible and human. An algorithm would evaluate trust on your behalf and it would look to the people you trust, and then who they trust, and so on and assign scores to people. Distrust, or even other observations, could percolate in a similar way.
Then on social networks, or some sort of small-web, new users would need to find other people to vouch for them to establish trust. When viewing websites or social media posts the trust score of users could be shown alongside content, and used to filter feeds / visibility. A troll or bot could rather rapidly get picked up by a network of distrust so they could be filtered out quickly.
The algorithms and details of such a thing are fuzzy to me, and I think a lot of care and thought would be needed to try to ensure it doesn't collapse under subtle flaws with time.
It's the most dumb article I have ever seen on Hackernews.
No TCP/IP means no normal internet routing. → You would need a totally new way for machines to find and send data to each other.
Bots are not tied to HTTP/HTML forever, people can write new bots for the new protocol, including by the use of GUI automation (digital or with plotters that mimic human actions (instagam farm bots))
Yes there's technical challenges, but the current iteration of the clearnet is on life support from a humanistic perspective.
And, projects of similar conceptual scope already been accomplished. There exists more than one application layer network built on top of the current Internet.
If you want to criticize the idea I encourage you to; but please don't just shoot down and insult on hn.
I really feel like accusing comments of being made by AI, especially with as little evidence as using an arrow, should be discouraged in the guidelines. It's become tediously common despite already falling under numerous more general items in that list.
If such a thing ever becomes big enough that money can be made, it will rot, and orders of magnitude faster than the current internet did.
More than making the new stack non-interoperable with existing tech, you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money. And then you're talking an even bigger revolution than a new internet.
There's a kernel of interesting ideas here, but I don't think it pays due enough attention to the rotting of the internet being a socioeconomic problem (feature?) first.
> you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money.
Why? Just eliminate surveillance.. no tracking is no money. There's another theory that maybe no money is no content, but that's sort of what tfa (and other stuff on HN lately) is actually talking about. Lots of people who would make content or just conversation for free are still relying on some sense of community which is under attack everywhere if not already destroyed. Community means organic discovery, organic participation, and some reasonable expectation of continuity / non-enshittification that's actually independent of corporate interests or sponsorship.
How do you limit the tracking? The site always gets the private data, it can't work without it. Sites farm out ads but they could be done by the site with no way to tell difference between an ad and a puppy pic.
There are also the other "small web" protocols (and some other stuff). Either way, it is still the same internet and not a new one, and still uses TCP/IP and DNS (although not HTTP/HTML). (That does not mean that it is not worth anything, though.)
This was my first thought when reading the title. I've spent the last month using chawan browser, which has a Gemini layer. And it's generally just a lot of fun to mix old web 1.0 layers with a new one.
Yes and it is cell phone friendly. I moved my site to gemini a couple of years ago. Maintenance is trivial compared to the WEB.
There is also gopher and USENET, but on cells it can be hard.
But the largest issue is the users attraction to "bright and shiny". I think no matter what comes I fear it will end up on the same path as now. Gemini has the ability to avoid enshitification, but it is still not attracting users like www.
Anyway alternatives exist but they need some TLC and a method to keep out commercial entities.
Gopher and Gemini can both work on many kind of devices; having a monochrome display, or the differences in input (e.g. having numbered lines works OK, especially since both require links to be on a line by itself, unlike HTML), etc, without the author of the document needing to worry about such things like that. In both cases text entry might sometimes be needed so is not ideal but still it is possible.
What is "TLC" meaning here? Furthermore, for the purpose of keeping out commercial entities, it would be necessary to have the details of what is intended to be avoided and in what contexts, as well as how to avoid certain things; I think simply "keeping out commercial entities" won't do (except perhaps for such things like e.g. indexing services, which can choose not to link to them).
I agree with the principle that the internet has, for lack of a better word, gone to shit.
This isn’t the answer though. It’s not technically feasible and doesn’t actually address the problem.
Your falling into the classic software brain trap of thinking the solution to a social problem is a technical one, when that isn’t necessarily the case.
Bloody hell. All the way down to TCP/IP? Listen, even getting myself fully IPv6 was a freaking adventure. This is dead in the water. I've gone so far as having a Gemini instance at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev which no one has accessed. To be honest, I don't even understand the motivation. The Internet seems fine to me. The protocols in use here are quite nice and there's always Gemini if you want a protocol that is pure document oriented.
Perhaps a HTTP browser that only `Accept`s `text/markdown` might be interesting but replacing IP is right out for me to participate in, at least.
> I've gone so far as having a Gemini instance at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev which no one has accessed.
If nobody else knows then they might not access, but I looked; at least some of the parts looks like interesting to me.
> The protocols in use here are quite nice and there's always Gemini if you want a protocol that is pure document oriented.
As well as others, depending on what you want to do; it is not quite as simple as "pure document oriented" (e.g. Gemini does have inputs (1x status code) and TLS as well, including authentication with client certificates).
> Perhaps a HTTP browser that only `Accept`s `text/markdown`
It might also be made to be modular so that the file formats and other features can be added separately (including HTTP, HTML, Unicode, etc also would not be forcibly built-in, and the different protocols, file formats, character sets, and other features can be done by adding them on (which can be static or dynamic; static might allow some possible optimizations but would require recompiling and/or relinking it when you want to change it)).
I instantly thought of Reticulum too. I got into LoRa based stuff last weekend and the thought of sending messages super slowly to random people around the Chicago area has me excited again about the possiblities of a distrubuted network that nobody truely owns. I bet LoRa based projects are going to have tons of problems at scale but right now it's pretty fun.
Hate to sound elitist but the normie-ification of the internet has ruined it. I started using the internet long after the "Eternal September", and even in my lifetime the decline has been stark.
To escape everything that makes the internet garbage now, I've come to the conclusion we need gated digital communities kept free of anything other than donation-based monetisation.
If you like HN but not Reddit then why not develop a simple blocking whitelist? You’d have to update it for all the good sites, but it would be easier than everyone else changing networks.
Explain to me the risk to you, average internet user....of a competing network you might choose to join. This may not be the right implementation but p2p and mesh networks seem like the only solve to walled gardens and the current landscape.
what obvious attack vector? It's just a list of urls and dates, and the dates don't even really mean anything.
It would be better if it acted like a vouch tree so you could create a web of trust but there's no enforcement mechanism so I don't even know how that would work.
I don't remember the name of the software/protocol, but I once saw a demonstration of something that seemed similar to the Internet using amateur radios communicating with each other. I think they had either email or something functionally similar, but I was told that it didn't use Ethernet or IP at all (if I'm remembering correctly).
I disagree with the idea that money is what ruined the internet, to a degree.
What ruined the internet was, quite frankly, non-nerdy people who caused the average intelligence of the internet to massively drop causing everything to be catered to LCD rather than assuming a basic competency.
Yes, everything needing to extract money is part of it but that wouldn't be as offensive if there was still alignment on demographics of the internet; nerds, geeks, and various outcasts.
The solution to this is community and admin self-policing. HN has accomplished this by having community buy-in that we aren't Reddit so any Reddit-esque jokes or low quality replies quite immediately get removed causing the behavior to get trained out of newbs.
Ok, this isn’t the way (replacing TCP/IP is impossible - we can’t even upgrade the VERSION of IP for god’s sake), but I do like the intent.
Since you have nerd sniped me, I will take a riff at what the principles should be (feel free to disagree):
1. The internet should be centered on devices we own. It runs on our devices, data is stored on our devices. For god’s sake, you can get a 20TB drive now for $500.
2. The internet should be local-first too. The normal order of operations should mean that things are local such that they work offline too by default.
3. The internet should be private. What we view shouldn’t be trackable. I think some of this falls out of 1 and 2, but something something like Tor for the rest.
I think this aligns with the principles of local-first software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ largely, with a twist of content addressed storage for bulk static content exchange (so more Git than CRDTs).
All it takes, though, is for one unscrupulous or lazy individual to join, and then they vouch for a few people they don’t really know, and then you get a bot vouched for, and then a few more, and the first few bots vouch for other bots, and soon they’re all vouching for each other and you’re back to where you started.
Basically, it’s a system that works at a scale where individuals can hold one another accountable. But not really beyond the Dunbar number, and certainly not at internet scale.
Came here to say the same thing. It does use TCP/IP but I didn't really understand why "no TCP/IP" is a hard requirement of the original article anyway.
> What we basically need is a completely new protocol stack that is not interoperable with TCP/IP.
You cannot solve social problems using technical solutions.
Someone would simply build a bridge and siphon data out or in. Interoperability is one of those low-hanging fruits that, once solved, ruins its value.
You can solve a ton of social problems with technical solutions.
100 different, easy to integrate internets federated across a number of different communication technologies and protocols is actually very hard to regulate and capture.
Sure, you won't have another Facebook, but we children of the 70s, 80s,and 90s would ser value in that.
cant the boomers just go to nursing already so we can forget them and build our own internet with our own ideas?
the internet isn't "dead" its turning inwards towards private group chats and less public discourse.
When I was but a youngster, the "internet" part of "internet protocol" was precisely that.
When I was a novice programmer, we used to move packets between DECnet, IP and X.500 networks all the time.
When I didn't know much about computers, networks were federated by default.
The thing is, time went by and we realized that IP was just better than all the others, and everybody started using it for everything.
And if you're making the claim that the root of problems like walled gardens and enshittification is the internet protocol ... get outa here.
I have wondered if a pseudo-social / pseudo-technical solution of some sort of trust graph could help.
Like you would say who you think is credible and human. An algorithm would evaluate trust on your behalf and it would look to the people you trust, and then who they trust, and so on and assign scores to people. Distrust, or even other observations, could percolate in a similar way.
Then on social networks, or some sort of small-web, new users would need to find other people to vouch for them to establish trust. When viewing websites or social media posts the trust score of users could be shown alongside content, and used to filter feeds / visibility. A troll or bot could rather rapidly get picked up by a network of distrust so they could be filtered out quickly.
The algorithms and details of such a thing are fuzzy to me, and I think a lot of care and thought would be needed to try to ensure it doesn't collapse under subtle flaws with time.
It's the most dumb article I have ever seen on Hackernews.
No TCP/IP means no normal internet routing. → You would need a totally new way for machines to find and send data to each other.
Bots are not tied to HTTP/HTML forever, people can write new bots for the new protocol, including by the use of GUI automation (digital or with plotters that mimic human actions (instagam farm bots))
The article is a little naive, yea, but it's not even close to the dumbest article I've ever seen on HN :-)
That seems harsh.
Yes there's technical challenges, but the current iteration of the clearnet is on life support from a humanistic perspective.
And, projects of similar conceptual scope already been accomplished. There exists more than one application layer network built on top of the current Internet.
If you want to criticize the idea I encourage you to; but please don't just shoot down and insult on hn.
> If you want to criticize the idea I encourage you
They just did. That isn't "just" shooting down.
I personally try to remove arrows from LLM outputs before sharing.
I place the probability that GP's post was LLM-generated at approximately 0%.
I really feel like accusing comments of being made by AI, especially with as little evidence as using an arrow, should be discouraged in the guidelines. It's become tediously common despite already falling under numerous more general items in that list.
You’re absolutely right! It’s a tired criticism that provides nothing to the discussion.
At least he got the premise right, if not the implementation. That is better than 50% of articles. :)
The premise being that the root cause of walled gardens, enshittification, data trading etc. is IP ? Get outa here ...
No that’s the implementation, the premise is that the current internet is not working for us (the people) and we need to move to something that does.
If such a thing ever becomes big enough that money can be made, it will rot, and orders of magnitude faster than the current internet did.
More than making the new stack non-interoperable with existing tech, you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money. And then you're talking an even bigger revolution than a new internet.
There's a kernel of interesting ideas here, but I don't think it pays due enough attention to the rotting of the internet being a socioeconomic problem (feature?) first.
> you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money.
Why? Just eliminate surveillance.. no tracking is no money. There's another theory that maybe no money is no content, but that's sort of what tfa (and other stuff on HN lately) is actually talking about. Lots of people who would make content or just conversation for free are still relying on some sense of community which is under attack everywhere if not already destroyed. Community means organic discovery, organic participation, and some reasonable expectation of continuity / non-enshittification that's actually independent of corporate interests or sponsorship.
“Just eliminate surveillance”.
That’s a lot easier said than done.
How do you limit the tracking? The site always gets the private data, it can't work without it. Sites farm out ads but they could be done by the site with no way to tell difference between an ad and a puppy pic.
You should checkout the Gemini Protocol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
And I definitely suggest writing a server or client for it! It is a really fun weekend project.
There are also the other "small web" protocols (and some other stuff). Either way, it is still the same internet and not a new one, and still uses TCP/IP and DNS (although not HTTP/HTML). (That does not mean that it is not worth anything, though.)
This was my first thought when reading the title. I've spent the last month using chawan browser, which has a Gemini layer. And it's generally just a lot of fun to mix old web 1.0 layers with a new one.
Yes and it is cell phone friendly. I moved my site to gemini a couple of years ago. Maintenance is trivial compared to the WEB.
There is also gopher and USENET, but on cells it can be hard.
But the largest issue is the users attraction to "bright and shiny". I think no matter what comes I fear it will end up on the same path as now. Gemini has the ability to avoid enshitification, but it is still not attracting users like www.
Anyway alternatives exist but they need some TLC and a method to keep out commercial entities.
Gopher and Gemini can both work on many kind of devices; having a monochrome display, or the differences in input (e.g. having numbered lines works OK, especially since both require links to be on a line by itself, unlike HTML), etc, without the author of the document needing to worry about such things like that. In both cases text entry might sometimes be needed so is not ideal but still it is possible.
What is "TLC" meaning here? Furthermore, for the purpose of keeping out commercial entities, it would be necessary to have the details of what is intended to be avoided and in what contexts, as well as how to avoid certain things; I think simply "keeping out commercial entities" won't do (except perhaps for such things like e.g. indexing services, which can choose not to link to them).
I agree with the principle that the internet has, for lack of a better word, gone to shit.
This isn’t the answer though. It’s not technically feasible and doesn’t actually address the problem.
Your falling into the classic software brain trap of thinking the solution to a social problem is a technical one, when that isn’t necessarily the case.
Bloody hell. All the way down to TCP/IP? Listen, even getting myself fully IPv6 was a freaking adventure. This is dead in the water. I've gone so far as having a Gemini instance at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev which no one has accessed. To be honest, I don't even understand the motivation. The Internet seems fine to me. The protocols in use here are quite nice and there's always Gemini if you want a protocol that is pure document oriented.
Perhaps a HTTP browser that only `Accept`s `text/markdown` might be interesting but replacing IP is right out for me to participate in, at least.
> I've gone so far as having a Gemini instance at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev which no one has accessed.
If nobody else knows then they might not access, but I looked; at least some of the parts looks like interesting to me.
> The protocols in use here are quite nice and there's always Gemini if you want a protocol that is pure document oriented.
As well as others, depending on what you want to do; it is not quite as simple as "pure document oriented" (e.g. Gemini does have inputs (1x status code) and TLS as well, including authentication with client certificates).
> Perhaps a HTTP browser that only `Accept`s `text/markdown`
It might also be made to be modular so that the file formats and other features can be added separately (including HTTP, HTML, Unicode, etc also would not be forcibly built-in, and the different protocols, file formats, character sets, and other features can be done by adding them on (which can be static or dynamic; static might allow some possible optimizations but would require recompiling and/or relinking it when you want to change it)).
https://reticulum.network/
I instantly thought of Reticulum too. I got into LoRa based stuff last weekend and the thought of sending messages super slowly to random people around the Chicago area has me excited again about the possiblities of a distrubuted network that nobody truely owns. I bet LoRa based projects are going to have tons of problems at scale but right now it's pretty fun.
Hate to sound elitist but the normie-ification of the internet has ruined it. I started using the internet long after the "Eternal September", and even in my lifetime the decline has been stark.
To escape everything that makes the internet garbage now, I've come to the conclusion we need gated digital communities kept free of anything other than donation-based monetisation.
Dial-up BBS checks all these boxes. Now have at it!
> There are tiny safe zones, like secret closed invite-only forums
How can a non cool clueless child of the 80's join these secret clubs?
If you like HN but not Reddit then why not develop a simple blocking whitelist? You’d have to update it for all the good sites, but it would be easier than everyone else changing networks.
Explain to me the risk to you, average internet user....of a competing network you might choose to join. This may not be the right implementation but p2p and mesh networks seem like the only solve to walled gardens and the current landscape.
Seems to me like OP is trying to work around dns
The human.json protocol is worth checking out as a proxy for the whole "more human internet" conversation. Not perfect but interesting!
https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json
`human.json` is a neat idea and I’ve been watching it closely. I’m even debating dropping one on my own site.
That being said, the fact that the obvious attack vector goes completely unaddressed gives me pause.
what obvious attack vector? It's just a list of urls and dates, and the dates don't even really mean anything.
It would be better if it acted like a vouch tree so you could create a web of trust but there's no enforcement mechanism so I don't even know how that would work.
I don't remember the name of the software/protocol, but I once saw a demonstration of something that seemed similar to the Internet using amateur radios communicating with each other. I think they had either email or something functionally similar, but I was told that it didn't use Ethernet or IP at all (if I'm remembering correctly).
Edit: found it, it was TARPN https://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html
I disagree with the idea that money is what ruined the internet, to a degree.
What ruined the internet was, quite frankly, non-nerdy people who caused the average intelligence of the internet to massively drop causing everything to be catered to LCD rather than assuming a basic competency.
Yes, everything needing to extract money is part of it but that wouldn't be as offensive if there was still alignment on demographics of the internet; nerds, geeks, and various outcasts.
The solution to this is community and admin self-policing. HN has accomplished this by having community buy-in that we aren't Reddit so any Reddit-esque jokes or low quality replies quite immediately get removed causing the behavior to get trained out of newbs.
Too late for the tech part. The tech stack may be incomprehensible for humans, but LLMs will build on top of it just fine.
>So one way to keep it from getting enshittified, again is to make the barrier to entry just a touch higher, or add friction.
We already had that, it was called crypto mining. Profit motive has taken care of that already
Ok, this isn’t the way (replacing TCP/IP is impossible - we can’t even upgrade the VERSION of IP for god’s sake), but I do like the intent.
Since you have nerd sniped me, I will take a riff at what the principles should be (feel free to disagree):
1. The internet should be centered on devices we own. It runs on our devices, data is stored on our devices. For god’s sake, you can get a 20TB drive now for $500.
2. The internet should be local-first too. The normal order of operations should mean that things are local such that they work offline too by default.
3. The internet should be private. What we view shouldn’t be trackable. I think some of this falls out of 1 and 2, but something something like Tor for the rest.
I think this aligns with the principles of local-first software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ largely, with a twist of content addressed storage for bulk static content exchange (so more Git than CRDTs).
It feels like you are describing what Matrix is to me now, a federated place where you can hop around but most places are strict about who can enter.
Curation is the cure, but it takes attention from creation. Moderation is power, but the time it takes is a curse.
The network is vast, but only some nodes are valuable.
We already tried that with "web3" and as time has shown, it was a complete disaster.
Some form of gatekeeping, or vouching system seems far more practical to implement.
All it takes, though, is for one unscrupulous or lazy individual to join, and then they vouch for a few people they don’t really know, and then you get a bot vouched for, and then a few more, and the first few bots vouch for other bots, and soon they’re all vouching for each other and you’re back to where you started.
Basically, it’s a system that works at a scale where individuals can hold one another accountable. But not really beyond the Dunbar number, and certainly not at internet scale.
geminispace already exists, though. Just go there.
Came here to say the same thing. It does use TCP/IP but I didn't really understand why "no TCP/IP" is a hard requirement of the original article anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
There's a few efforts in this area, and I agree, there is value to be extracted.
'value to be extracted' seems like the exact opposite of the author's sentiment.
It doesn't make sense... like a lot of it. Probably because he is marketer. I get he is upset because things change and that's it.
i will watch tv show <Silicon Valley> again
If TFA had been "it's time to build a new World Wide Web", I'd be on board. Most of the web is a dumpster fire and has been for a while.
But there's lots of good stuff on the Internet that isn't the web or web-adjacent.