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 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.

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.

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.

Sounds like an XY problem. What op wants is high barrier of entry and high curation. That exists already, but by virtue of high barrier of entry, they are hard to find :p. Discords, matrix, webrings, weird little websites.

How can a non cool clueless child of the 80's join these secret clubs?

Seems to me like OP is trying to work around dns

https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json

Local first down to the city/regional datacenter not the home. Datacenter serving and providing service to its region at a low cost and it should hold its user data and avoid sharing with other servers as much as possible.

When you buy an internet plan it should come with a domain either a custom or a city/region.country. The internet plan should come with an email, internet wallet, reasonable amount of cloud storage, web server. If the user wants to replace any of these with their own self hosted service thats fine.

Two seperate webs. Clear web, transparent at a government level, absolutely no anonymity, everyone uses their full name, their full ID and can get arrested for saying and doing unhinged illegal things. You setup your personal AI to troll on reddit, warning from the police. You stalk and harrass people, vist from the police. you talk about firebombing a walmart, police vist. Friend/block list implemented so you can restrict certain people from viewing your content and your homepage block list should also allow you to block friends of a friend as well as allow friends of a friend etc. Browser settings can be more open by default. All bot traffic registers with their government.

Dark web, restricted access to only people over 18, people cannot be held legally liable for anything said or actions done(they should be able to say "thats not me" and there be no way to disprove, probably gonna be an absolute cess pit but im actually optimistic people would make some cool spaces and it'd foster its own unique culture with gatekeeping and natural webs of trust. Full anonymity privacy, can roll new digital wallets, can roll new auth keys, browsers very locked down and sandboxed, the regional data centers would run nodes to provide speed and resiliency to the network.

I dont know how many people would want this. Probably hearing it everyone hates it and recoils but I reckon after 10 years when people's brains have healed they would say its best than the current internet.

Edit: found it, it was TARPN https://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html

Wait, is this person a ghostwriter? A slopmonger?

LinkedIn as a good-faith networking site is trashed

Yeah, how did that happen?

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.

I also feel like if you're going to invent a new internet from first principles, how are you going to not end up with the current one? (or a shitty version of it)

The answer might be an invite tree as the article suggests. They might be hoping for too much user quality from the invite tree, or at least hoping for a level of user quality that would only work at a small scale. Rather than "zany founders, reclusive poets, eccentric engineers of all kinds, high school teachers, homegrown philosophers, garage tinkerers, and beloved drug-addled futurist artists", imo to include a lot of people a simple invite tree would get you "not a literal bot". Trying to actually evaluate user quality gets you into moderation, federation, it is not easy. You could keep it small, but that's not an Internet replacement, that's a private forum, which as the author says they already have.

Imo a good start would be the much narrow problem of identifying your device as not a bot when browsing. Something like google fraud defense https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362 except instead of a google owning your identity, some sort of user tree where you can vouch anonymously for people you know, and ban users and users who added them for scraping.

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).

The network is vast, but only some nodes are valuable.

Which immediately raises the question of what constituents bad faith interaction?

I think the author is at least saying that content created for the express purpose of pushing products is a bad faith interaction they don't want to engage with, cool, I'm not exactly a fan of ads myself

So what are different kinds of ecosystem that are resistant to bad faith interactions and why?

Academia is one to a degree, that's one kind of space where doing this kind of bad faith interaction would receive pushback, so it becomes not worth doing, that's one kind of negative feedback cycle, I think to a degree HN has a similar dynamic of the censor backed with moderation, the cost here would be the space constantly working to keep itself "pure"

My understanding is 4chan and it's like are another, their strategy is to create such a hostile environment that capital has limited interest in engaging with it, all you get are "authentic" interactions, though I'm not going to pretend I've spent much of any real time on there, so this is at best based on second hand experience, the cost here is more interesting, how hostile an environment are the users willing to bare and perpetuate in order to create their safe haven?

Then there's non-standard technical spaces, I'm less confident than the author that you can create a real alternative web without paying a tax on some level, what I mean by that is if you're building a protocol, it has on some level to be hostile or it's going to get co-opted, what comes to mind is something more like a multimodal protocol, you don't send text, you send media the vast majority of the time, VNC for example might work, your clients register click and hover states in 2d space and your servers are basically game engines, it would be very technically hostile, however until AI tools get a lot better, there's really little for them to work with and taking and remixing content is now fully on the authors terms, the downside is this might be worse, because it is very limiting and completely against the principles of what the web was built on, so if capital ever decides that they value this new space there's a lot they can do here

Am alternative tax is going fully into the p2p world, we build a network based on caching and p2p sharing and tracking anonymous metrics of how much content has spread, or who in the network has S it, that would at least indicate if it's something widespread or if it's something people who you trust engage with, this will make a network of gaps, where the cost is potentially even more fragmentation, however you can at least trust that some people who you know are on some level vouching for the content you see

It's a hard problem, I'm interested if this reframing on costs gives people a better way to think about it?

If we didn't have a strategy for X in the first place did we build the right thing? Should we go build another same-shaped thing also with no strategy for X?

Ah, but protocols and all of the good stuff from humanity, etc. Come on...

The internet is still there. Just go find it. Just go spend your time, money, and attention on it instead of where you are spending it now.

You won't do that, though. Will you?

People...

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.

We already had that, it was called crypto mining. Profit motive has taken care of that already

People use block a lot there, not being rude, but just to curate their own feed so that it only has the stuff they want to see. There's a lot of left-wing and "woke" content, but that's a preference. If you don't lean that way, just start blocking and following to get the feed you want.

There's no algorithm, or any way to impose one, and no central control. It's a lightly modified ActivityPub protocol so you can always make your own client and server setup if you want.

I haven't seen any proper commercial spam yet, and the few MLM posts I've instantly blocked (I suspect hacked accounts). Since you only see who you follow, there's no way for a commercial account to get any reach - you'd have to pay someone with a lot of followers to boost your post to get it anywhere.

I'm really enjoying it.

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))

But there's lots of good stuff on the Internet that isn't the web or web-adjacent.

It felt awesome because what we had before were books and TV.

We can’t recreate the feeling we had back then, because it was caused by a drastically new experience.

Suddenly I could chat with people on the other side of the planet that I had never met before. Suddenly I had access to an inifinite amount of content without having to browse a physical library or wait for the right radio program to air.

It was a liberation.

But the truth is that content quality was generally low, and it was difficult to search.

There was no wikipedia, no hacker news, most websites were full of ad banners, pyramid schemes, half baked content, keywords designed to optimize SEO. You’d spend literally hours clicking through web rings, just to realize none of the websites in the ring were good.

Connection was slow as fuck, and expensive. Downloading a good quality photo could take 5-10 minutes. And these were minutes you would pay for the price of a phone call.

It was extremely impractical.

The internet has since been through many phases. There was maybe a piracy phase, with Napster and CD burners. Then the start of Google was quite something. The start of facebook was exciting to a lot of people (I am proud to have never joined), and so were the beginnings of Twitter. Now it’s clearly all about video content.

But it’s never stopped being the internet. Every time something new arises, like Second Life, or Youtube, or Discord, it feels fresh again, and then we see the cracks, we feel the pressure or monetization.

My point is that the feeling that OP is after is that feeling of freshness, of optimism, of experiencing something different. People like that don’t realize that what they’re after is not an end goal, it’s a journey.

Even without enshittification, a mature network is never going to keep the dynamics of its early days. Many people criticize HN, Wikipedia, Youtube for not being what they used to be. Even though the content is still there and still good.

It is true to a certain extent that succesfull networks eventually attract bad actors, but imo boredom is the most important factor in the decline of these systems.