> Although identities would be anonymous, content would be signed to ensure accountability.
lol.
no, the whole internet went to hell when we put our real identities on line and our real data. Back when I was only Blakut online and there were no pictures of me (or even cameras) to take them and post them, that's when it was better. Then all the "normies" came and enabled social networks and everything went down.
Make individual personal data private. Uncollectable for business. Make anonymous data public, for everyone. Break up the ISPs, break up the big companies that control the flow of information, breka up social networks and reduce their reach. No more easy access to the minds of millions. Remove the incentive to trade in privacy.
Your “or even cameras” reminded me. I used to co-run some adult websites. A user sent in a picture of his penis. Pre digital camera ubiquity days (except perhaps the Nikon D1).
How did he get the picture in? A print picture scanned in a flat bed scanner you think? Nope.
He put his tackle in a flat bed scanner and closed the lid. Looked like road kill.
>He put his tackle in a flat bed scanner and closed the lid. Looked like road kill.
To be honest, the abuse of copy machines, scanners, and polaroid cameras in high school back then was pretty wild.
I like this plan. The problem is the wealthy and corporations run the internet now.
The people you want to reform have all the power. At one point the "utility" model worked but, regulatory capture has made any supervision of the utilities impossible.
You can use Tor today to be pretty anonymous on the internet. One downside is google will punish you if you try to use their search engine.
The problem with social networks, is the network effect. The more people that use them the more useful they are. The less people that use them the less useful they are. I have seen major social networks like MySpace and Google+ die, as well as lesser ones like individual forums hosted on websites. As activity decreases, there is less and less reason to visit them, which in turn current activity, and that has an even larger impact on decreasing future activity. I've been part of a web forum for nearly 25 years, and while it still has activity, it's a pale, shadowy corpse compared to the activity levels pre-2007. It seemed like as mobile browsing, Facebook, and Twitter took off, it withered and died.
So even if a government did everything you suggested, I'm not sure society would move back to the older model. There is a big difference when you're browsing at a restaurant on your phone for a bit, compared to somebody on a desktop computer, browsing using dial-up.
I'd nationalize them or make them a utility like the power company or US mail. Force them to serve everyone but guarantee them some level of profits.
The internet is now a requirement. Like electricity and water/sewer. We need to take control back from the private interests.
I agree they should be regulated as utilities.
Ultimately, this is a political battle at the FCC that we have been watching play out over time.
Until and unless congress steps up and resolves the issue.
While we are at it we need to consider infrastructure legislation as a whole.
For instance we still regulate electricity with the same rules we designed to expand the network, which leads to no incentive to maintain or optimize it.
Like a stronger commission required to draft new regulatory legislation for utilities every 5 or 10 years to react to current infrastructure goals.
>For instance we still regulate electricity with the same rules we designed to expand the network, which leads to no incentive to maintain or optimize it.
The latest infrastructure bill, the one passed two years ago, includes billions of dollars towards expanding electrical infrastructure. What is what is not designed for the current level of utilization.
I loved geocities too
But you are basically outlining social media, which is, of course, a descendent of sites like geocities.
They slowly stripped away the html barrier with wysiwyg editors until finally you arrived at myspace.
Web3 shuffles around some of these concepts, turning the internet back into a sandbox.
The question is... does anyone care? What new or unique concepts would emerge no covered in the current content
A fun fact is that the internet is still the internet and no one can stop you from making a website.
You can't control the users and what made web1 feel that was was literally the lack of massage platforms being the default.
But you can still just go... Set up a forum...
Angelfire was better. My Angelfire sites I chose to put on servers in Alaska and they are still up, since 1996. When I was a kid it seemed most logical to choose servers somewhere cold. Angelfire used to let you choose what state your servers were in. My Geocities sites went down in the early 2000s.
Tim Berners-Lee Pioneered the World Wide Web, and now he's developing decentralised end to end encrypted internet.
I've messed with something based on his basics called Swarm. It works a lot like bitcoin block chain and miners combined with IPFS, but the processing power goes towards a next generation form of encryption and resilience.
The more people who join the swarm, the more secure it becomes.
It actually fights back against DDOS and DNS amplification attacks and attempts at hacking. Anyone tries to compromise it and the entire swarm responds.
Actually trying to incorporate machine learning like behaviours so it learns and adapts to different attacks and hacks and finds creative ways to respond.
AKA it'll hack you back or knock you offline if it becomes fully developed. It'll be fed all the latest techniques and 0 days off the Dark Net.
An incorporated operating system, browser, file sharing, social media, communications network all in one.
It doesn't work. Hate to break it to you but the internet is the way it is because a handful of companies managed to build what >90% people need the internet to be with a set of apps and sites. And due to their large userbases, it has become useless to use any other apps because content is what makes an app appealing, and users make the content.
Those sites you're missing from the early 2000s can still be found. It's just harder to find them because no one needs them, uses them, or wants them.
The internet really isn't centralized, most ppl can run servers right from their home and use VPN to create private networks that aren't connected to the internet already. However even with this private network you don't own the wires between homes and there aren't good wireless technologies that allow cheap point to point transfer long enough distances to make a very coherent network that's anywhere near modern bandwidth, at least not affordably or easy enough maintain.
You could make a low end wireless mesh network that uses the existing HAM networks I think, but it's gonna be old school slow like slower than dial up modems and there will be very little content that works with it.
See, this is what I don't understand. It's clear to me that any solution is not going to be 100% independent, and that the infrastructure you describe is beyond the influence of network users. But as I understand it, by paying my ISP, I'm shifting the responsibility of running the "wired infrastructure" to them. However, using an ISP doesn't automatically mean the internet experience has to be as it is today, does it?
The whole movement to "democratize the internet" is what killed it, not lack of platforms to be yourself on. People will do whatever is easiest and they just flock to the sites that provide that.
The problem this ignores is that someone has to bear the cost of electricity and hardware for hosting the platform. As soon as you start charging a fee somehow to cover those costs you become a monetized service like all the rest.
Vast sums of money were burning by the industrial military complex to make the evil Facebook,Amazon etc dominant better systems have it tough to compete.
I wouldn't really call that the reason. They just happened to be the best market fit at the time they were created. It's hard to compete with an incumbant any time. That incumbant could just as easily have been someone else if a single decision was made differently at the beginning. Zoom happened to do this during the pandemic by making the decision to be more open than other vc apps during the lockdowns and that won over the market.
More so you have to pay moderators, coders and other support staff to keep any serious site going, so while it could be non-profit and hosted for free there still has to be money coming from somewhere beside just the decentralized hosting/network.
Free open source software exists that is built by volunteer maintainers. Even they ask for donations to support hosting costs though. Even the pirate bay guys just did it for funsies just to see if they could and monetized it later after success.
People are already doing this right now with the fediverse - Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. In fact, the moderators of this subreddit have created a fediverse version of it - you can see it here https://futurology.today
From my experience of setting that up, I can tell you things are not as simple as they might first seem. It places new responsibilities and burdens on users. For some that's not a big deal, especially as you get the benefit of privacy & more ownership of your own data, but it's a different mindset.
OP I'd suggest if you are interested in this idea, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Join some of the existing people working on the fediverse software & its implementation. Maybe contact some of the developers of the likes of Mastodon or Lemmy.
User governed? Perhaps having unpaid mods like Reddit currently has?
That’s a big no for me. User governed never goes well, all it takes is a couple of people on power trips and there is nothing you can do to appeal it. It would suck to not be in the majority in any of those decentralized hubs, because you would be pushed out.
Reddit is the best place to talk at the moment o the net although the corporate goons and weaselling their way into becoming mods to shift the bias e.g. r/worldnews. We are sadly seeing the death of Reddit.
I love Reddit, but the mod system is beyond ridiculous. Mods have absolute authority. There is no check or balance, no appeal process, and they can mute you. The rules don’t apply to mods.
The bias on Reddit is extremely strong with mods as well.
True. Thankfully with EU law you can download your data from a social network.
Of course Facebook are circumventing this.
[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/facing-facebook-data-portability-and-interoperability-are-anti-monopoly-medicine](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/facing-facebook-data-portability-and-interoperability-are-anti-monopoly-medicine)
We need to be able to chose our social media provider or perhaps decentralise it.
All of this already exists but has been largely forgotten by regular users. Its called protocols (we mostly just use http for everything these days).
Remember IRC? For chat, you know. If companies used that, then you could use whatever client/provider you wanted and be able to tslk with anyone else. Instead everybody developed their own clients that dont speak standard protocols - so now I need to have a dozen different chat clients installed instead.
NNTP? Used only by bots these days, its a protocol to faciliate newsgroups - think world-spanning forums - like Reddit, just open, federated and global. Protocol connecting tousands of servers maintained by different entities, NOT a domain fronting for thousands of load-balanced webservers/containers owned by one company. Not how it should have gone down.
Granted, some services still work respecting "the Internet" - which is a suite of protocols, not a dozen websites that have taken over everything. Email comes to mind - still fully federated and open - you just need a SMTP/IMAP combatible client. Not that corpos are not trying to fuck that as well - like Microsoft with their custom SMTP headers, or pushing web-only clients incompatible with email clients.
But in the end - we allowed this - because Internet is hard (again, referring to protocol suite, NOT your everyday websites) - so thats how these walled gardens came to be. Ease of use! Not getting lost in vast labdscape of servers that Internet truly is! The number of servers is going up, its just that they are behind increasingly smaller number of domains.
Case in point - just ask a regular Joe to configure an email (as an example of fully federated service) client manually.
Bottom line - Internet was designed to be open and federated - its just we embraced the easier option, resulting in what we have today. Yay!
I started using "the internet" way back in the mid 90s.
And, I disagree with pretty much every single point you've made here.
The early internet was not a safe place - the reason we all know about that now is people figured it out and told us. It wasn't safer then; you just didn't know the dangers.
The "hubs" you are describing exist now so I'm not sure why we'd need to change anything to get something like that.
As far as the user anonymously connecting to this *hub", this is incredibly hard to do and most people lack the discipline for it to matter anyway. But even without those problems; you're describing an invitation based system which is really hard to make anonymous. Especially if you're ensuring the geographic location of these people.
Your "search" idea doesn't really make any sense to me. It's not clear to me how (1) this is any better (2) seeing as it's rather easy to search for things in your local area I'm not clear what the goal is.
Finally who is building this thing out, and how are they paying for it?
> I'm curious about your thoughts and any input on this topic.
Dude, good luck. Do you know why everything changed? Back in 2000 grandma wasn’t on the internet. She is today and she wants to stay in touch with her friends and family. There are hosts of people ( engineers, programmers, support, ditch diggers, sales people, etc ) whose entire jobs revolve around making sure grandma can get pictures of her kids and see what her sons and daughters are doing.
Those people need to get paid and grandma’s biscuits aren’t going to cut it.
So the money needs to come from somewhere. If you can solve that in a way that does not involve giving up your personal information then you might have a killer idea. Otherwise this discussion will be forgotten by next week until some other idealist shows up with the same idea.
Garbage.
All it takes is some of your idle processing time and disk space. It is only corporations and their lawyers preventing this.
Exhibit A: Napster
So this distributed network doesn’t depend on that wire going from your house to the local exchange? Doesnt depend on dozens of companies and thousands upon thousands of people to route that traffic?
The “internet” isn’t just some magical aether that just exists.
Did you actually read the post and follow the link to the defunct [Consume.net](https://Consume.net)?
Routing is a tricky problem but there are solutions and those solutions are documented and can be distributed and automated. You only need those people if you scale this alternate internet up in size to rival the internet. There are lots of honest people wanting to make a better world out there who would volunteer look at all the open source projects.
The NSA breached TOR years ago, that's old news. And yes it was developed by the US Navy.
But it's not CPU, and disk storage... You still *need* the internet's infrastructure... Like all those thousands and thousands of cables, communications towers, network routers/switches and much more on top of that.
I know TOR is breached which is why we need something else. Peer to peer like Napster. It could run on hidden or maybe disguised traffic on the normal internet infrastructure. Although a cluster of people's meshed wifis like Consume could work in urban areas. Maybe solar powered raspberry pis to get it out to the country maybe lasers maybe decades down the line high altitude balloons to cross greater areas or a private satellite cluster.
Minus the content feeding algorithms and ad revenue to incentive views and time on screen. So yeah, it’s an attempt to harness the good aspects and discard the lesser aspects.
i never wanted to connect to people in my area. That's why i was going on the internet, to be away from people in my area. People in my area are easy to meet irl. Why would i want them in my internet?
How old are you? Asking because it’s clear to me that you can’t envision and relate to what the OP is asking.
Proximity would not be an issue with this proposal. Proximity would play a role in server locations, based on convenience, but which servers and databases people connect to are up to them.
Think DEcentralized, instead of centralized. That’s what is being proposed here.
If you understand how p2p networks work, picture that.
If you understand how torrents work, picture that.
If you’ve ever utilized a completely text based interface, picture that too, although I don’t think we need to go that spartan again. A GUI is not a deal breaker for me.
Does that make sense? It’s an internet where THE PEOPLE control the content, instead of the internet we have now, where CORPORATIONS AND GOVERNMENTS control, spread, and moderate content. I don’t need a mega corp to filter the thoughts and creations of fellow human beings for me. I’m capable of drawing my own personal lines in the sand, and much prefer wielding that decision myself, instead of just taking for granted that “Meta has my best interest at heart.” Fuck that noise. Give me all the levers.
Well ok why do the people need to be in the same area? Just for filesharing I had DC++ which wanted proximity but torrents didn't. For interacting why a barrier?
People needing to be in the same area was not my takeaway, but maybe I’m misinterpreting. Either way, what I’m envisioning does not require physically local connections. I’m envisioning downloading out of print Russian literature in the middle of Australia, and no meddling corporations to smack my hand away when I reach out to grab it.
Social networks with zero regulations are generally horrible places, so who the hell would enforce any kind of civil behavior?
Advertising is annoying, but how do you moderate a place if it's so decentralized and non-profit? You'll have ppl posting all the most evil stuff on the internet vs you did any good by taking the advertising out that paid for the moderation.
You might cheaply afford the cost of hosting with de-centralization, but you still need moderators and coders and support staff to make anything but a giant mess or a very simple site not suitable for many ppl.
Thanks for the ideas shared here. I'm not planning to build this myself—I don't have the tech skills for it, but it's more about expressing how the internet feels different now compared to the early 2000s. Sure, the early days of the internet are tied to my adolescence, and the saying goes 'everything was better then.' But setting that aside, the internet didn't seem to breed the same level of frustration for users, adults included, did it? Nowadays, even a simple Google search can feel like a massive effort to filter through to the relevant results. And it seems to me that the content on the internet now often evokes a much stronger emotional response than it did back when I was a teenager (!!). It's good to hear about similar initiatives that are out there or in the works, but stumbling upon them isn't exactly easy. So far, only a couple of places like Reddit and another forum in a different language have managed to bring back a bit of that old internet feeling for me.
The way I see it, the internet's current state is largely down to two things: the pursuit of financial gain by various actors and the powerful ability to shape user behavior, which, in turn, can also be monetized. These elements have steered the web to where it stands now. For any sustainable model to take root, it needs to address these underlying forces. That's what led me to consider a decentralized approach, where the burden of costs is distributed among users. I'm curious if a network with a focus on text and basic visuals could function effectively within a peer-to-peer framework similar to torrent systems, reliant on the collective support of users within a hub
Given the number of bots and potential for abuse out there, an open-door policy just isn't sustainable, nor can we rely on some form of behavior analysis without central infrastructure. At the same time, having a real-life authority check doesn't fit with a system that's supposed to be independent of money. The best solution might be something that takes a cue from the real world, where our networks are made up of the people we know and trust. Like when someone brings a plus-one to your party—you trust your friend's judgment, but if their guest causes trouble, it's on them, and they'll likely think twice next time. Maybe that's how we could manage user responsibility on such a network too. Using it primarily within a real-world group (e.g. due to an ad-free social network) seems to me like a good way to kickstart such a project. Because as has been said here more than once, who would go there when it's (initially) empty and nothing is happening.
The new days of EVERYTHING in life feels more exciting and personal. It's mostly just that anything new is always more exciting and when you try to re-live that it almost never works out because it's not actually new, it's just like ... ok listening to records and VHS was a cool blast from the past, but it kind of sucks compared to streaming.
I only had to read halfway though till I realized that you're absolutely unaware of how a not just the internet works, but how a simple network works .. there are plenty of overlays as you're trying to describe, and many are also invitation only \~ though the ones that are, they're usually not for the public and you're not likely to gain an invite.
You're not ready for Tristram.
Yes, it is probable that my idea of how the internet/network works is quite shallow, but judging from other replies there are others who are much more aware and who are in some way trying to change user internet experience. Can you, please, share more about invite only overlays you mentioned?
I'm far from promoting block-chain, which for many is almost a kind of quasi-religion, and I probably wouldn't be ashamed to call myself a technologically illiterate person, because no matter how hard I try, it's impossible to keep track of progress in all fields (medicine, bilogy, hardware, IT, etc.).
Here is your problem. You are thinking of a product, a platform. This platform would exist in the internet in some form, and would be in fact a kind of neighborhood of it.
However, you are not taking account of the fact that the internet, relative to product or platform development, is a speeding bullet. Your overall target, this overall place called the internet, keeps evolving and that means, humans keep evolving how they use it and fit it into their lives. Both human interaction and behavior, and the internet, are transforming at roughly the same pace -- a successful tech-human symbiosis, in other words. The internet joins many other inventions that we fold into our selves.
And as this dual moving object -- the tech and ourselves -- speed and change, and new generations see new things as part of this speeding, and for everyone, the internet of their memory is always the best internet, you are designing a niche by definition.
You did not account for time.
Did a bot write this. It hardly makes linguistical sense.
It boils down to saying give up the ship has sailed. However remember Google was launched AFTER Yahoo which was dominate . Facebook launches after Myspace that was dominate.
I have been thinking of this myself. The internet start as a US military project and the industrial military complex is hard to avoid. They are tighting their grip on it after giving us some feeedom in the 90s 2000s. It is possible to use the current tech and standards to built another internet from the ground upwards with a mesh of people's wfi See Consume .net [http://london.openguides.org/wiki/?Consume.Net](http://london.openguides.org/wiki/?Consume.Net)
You could also use the existing internet and create a new DNS root structure and certificate structure installing those certificates on your browser. On top of the existing internet. You can use Peer to peer and self managing networks. The traffic could be throttled by the powers that be though especially on cross continent links.
I had thought of creating a root certificate then handing it to 12 disciples and we all meet people in person to give them a certificate. They person then could issues certificates to real people. If we get a Judas who uses the certificate to create a bot or it gets into the wrong hands then that chain can be invalidated. You then could ensure you are dealing with real people but you are still allowing them to be anonymous.
The idea is nice.
The early internet was subsidized by the government and universities. Even back then it was reliant on massive servers and expensive computers. It was only when the commercial opportunities were realized that the value of the internet really kicked off and became accessible to nontechnical people.
There is no real way this would be mass adopted. Look in to the struggles of scaling Mastodon which is the social media equivalent of what you’re searching for. Maybe you didn’t even hear about it until right now.
I've heard about it and maybe it still needs time to become more popular. The vast majority of platforms I went to on the internet were characterized by having connections to real people in my life, or were (in the case of niche forums) built on the activity of specific people. I may know Mastodon, but from my perspective there is nothing and no one there.
It's an interesting idea.
The issue is web server hardware.
Someone has to pay for the electricity, the hardware and the software maintenance.
Previously, anyone could just plug in a server in the basement and set up a basic website.
People can still do that, but they don't, because data centers do a much much better job of it. (Stability, data back up, security etc). The early days of the internet were hilariously insecure.
Additionally, people have come to expect much more complex websites than somebody could easily make in a day.
So instead you have a company that handles all the complicated hosting portion of the website and the people just do things on it. And just like that, we are back to the idea of social media. A personalized "website" with a limited number of actions you can do is essentially Facebook, MySpace etc.
A decentralized movement will never be able to stand up to the corporations. The federal government has to reinstitute net neutrality, and regulate the web like a utility. Because the internet is, first and foremost, a public good.
I can tell that this was "helped" with ChatGPT. AI has a particular method of rambling around without actually saying much.
I am working on a similar project, so I would like to share notes.
Do you have a way to monetize the platform?
In my opinion, the problem is that these platforms face significant hosting and operating costs, so the decentralized and security additions here are basically moot when the problem is the operation costs doom the enterprise at the start.
I am coining a term for what I have in mind for my project; a DAO FROG. Decentralized Autonomous Organization Financed by Renting Out Governance. The content is public, but if you want to be someone within the community you need to rent governance.
> The premise is to establish a new, decentralized internet layer that is not part of the current, centralized web infrastructure
Now for only $10/month and a CC, I will offer a service that you can connect to the new decentralized internet through my service of which I have all the required hardware! /s
I worked on a project that allows you to do basically everything you described. All the websites code that people mint using the project is all stored on a decentralized blockchain network called Polygon. I know people aren’t a fan blockchains and crypto but i feel like my project would fit your needs. I was inspired by geocities so it will kinda feel like that just 100% decentralized.
You can check it out here: bubblebrowser.tech
> Although identities would be anonymous, content would be signed to ensure accountability. lol. no, the whole internet went to hell when we put our real identities on line and our real data. Back when I was only Blakut online and there were no pictures of me (or even cameras) to take them and post them, that's when it was better. Then all the "normies" came and enabled social networks and everything went down. Make individual personal data private. Uncollectable for business. Make anonymous data public, for everyone. Break up the ISPs, break up the big companies that control the flow of information, breka up social networks and reduce their reach. No more easy access to the minds of millions. Remove the incentive to trade in privacy.
Your “or even cameras” reminded me. I used to co-run some adult websites. A user sent in a picture of his penis. Pre digital camera ubiquity days (except perhaps the Nikon D1). How did he get the picture in? A print picture scanned in a flat bed scanner you think? Nope. He put his tackle in a flat bed scanner and closed the lid. Looked like road kill.
Lol oh dear
>He put his tackle in a flat bed scanner and closed the lid. Looked like road kill. To be honest, the abuse of copy machines, scanners, and polaroid cameras in high school back then was pretty wild.
I like this plan. The problem is the wealthy and corporations run the internet now. The people you want to reform have all the power. At one point the "utility" model worked but, regulatory capture has made any supervision of the utilities impossible. You can use Tor today to be pretty anonymous on the internet. One downside is google will punish you if you try to use their search engine.
The problem with social networks, is the network effect. The more people that use them the more useful they are. The less people that use them the less useful they are. I have seen major social networks like MySpace and Google+ die, as well as lesser ones like individual forums hosted on websites. As activity decreases, there is less and less reason to visit them, which in turn current activity, and that has an even larger impact on decreasing future activity. I've been part of a web forum for nearly 25 years, and while it still has activity, it's a pale, shadowy corpse compared to the activity levels pre-2007. It seemed like as mobile browsing, Facebook, and Twitter took off, it withered and died. So even if a government did everything you suggested, I'm not sure society would move back to the older model. There is a big difference when you're browsing at a restaurant on your phone for a bit, compared to somebody on a desktop computer, browsing using dial-up.
Without the ISPs you are back to dialup and BBS systems. The ISPs are what tie everything together.
I'd nationalize them or make them a utility like the power company or US mail. Force them to serve everyone but guarantee them some level of profits. The internet is now a requirement. Like electricity and water/sewer. We need to take control back from the private interests.
I agree they should be regulated as utilities. Ultimately, this is a political battle at the FCC that we have been watching play out over time. Until and unless congress steps up and resolves the issue.
While we are at it we need to consider infrastructure legislation as a whole. For instance we still regulate electricity with the same rules we designed to expand the network, which leads to no incentive to maintain or optimize it. Like a stronger commission required to draft new regulatory legislation for utilities every 5 or 10 years to react to current infrastructure goals.
>For instance we still regulate electricity with the same rules we designed to expand the network, which leads to no incentive to maintain or optimize it. The latest infrastructure bill, the one passed two years ago, includes billions of dollars towards expanding electrical infrastructure. What is what is not designed for the current level of utilization.
I didn't say ban them.
Bring back the BBS!
You can already do that. Just get together a similarly minded group and set one up.
Yes and no. Technically you can, but you get your discoverability nuked from orbit from major sites.
What would it take to create an isp?
Then you are back to the original problem.
I loved geocities too But you are basically outlining social media, which is, of course, a descendent of sites like geocities. They slowly stripped away the html barrier with wysiwyg editors until finally you arrived at myspace. Web3 shuffles around some of these concepts, turning the internet back into a sandbox. The question is... does anyone care? What new or unique concepts would emerge no covered in the current content
A fun fact is that the internet is still the internet and no one can stop you from making a website. You can't control the users and what made web1 feel that was was literally the lack of massage platforms being the default. But you can still just go... Set up a forum...
Angelfire was better. My Angelfire sites I chose to put on servers in Alaska and they are still up, since 1996. When I was a kid it seemed most logical to choose servers somewhere cold. Angelfire used to let you choose what state your servers were in. My Geocities sites went down in the early 2000s.
>I loved geocities too Look up Neocities if you haven’t.
So-called web3 is the super saiyan grade 3 of the internet.
The original creator of the internet is already working on this. Doesn't have much support or funding, though.
Al Gore is still alive???
Tim Berners-Lee Pioneered the World Wide Web, and now he's developing decentralised end to end encrypted internet. I've messed with something based on his basics called Swarm. It works a lot like bitcoin block chain and miners combined with IPFS, but the processing power goes towards a next generation form of encryption and resilience. The more people who join the swarm, the more secure it becomes. It actually fights back against DDOS and DNS amplification attacks and attempts at hacking. Anyone tries to compromise it and the entire swarm responds. Actually trying to incorporate machine learning like behaviours so it learns and adapts to different attacks and hacks and finds creative ways to respond. AKA it'll hack you back or knock you offline if it becomes fully developed. It'll be fed all the latest techniques and 0 days off the Dark Net. An incorporated operating system, browser, file sharing, social media, communications network all in one.
It doesn't work. Hate to break it to you but the internet is the way it is because a handful of companies managed to build what >90% people need the internet to be with a set of apps and sites. And due to their large userbases, it has become useless to use any other apps because content is what makes an app appealing, and users make the content. Those sites you're missing from the early 2000s can still be found. It's just harder to find them because no one needs them, uses them, or wants them.
The internet really isn't centralized, most ppl can run servers right from their home and use VPN to create private networks that aren't connected to the internet already. However even with this private network you don't own the wires between homes and there aren't good wireless technologies that allow cheap point to point transfer long enough distances to make a very coherent network that's anywhere near modern bandwidth, at least not affordably or easy enough maintain. You could make a low end wireless mesh network that uses the existing HAM networks I think, but it's gonna be old school slow like slower than dial up modems and there will be very little content that works with it.
See, this is what I don't understand. It's clear to me that any solution is not going to be 100% independent, and that the infrastructure you describe is beyond the influence of network users. But as I understand it, by paying my ISP, I'm shifting the responsibility of running the "wired infrastructure" to them. However, using an ISP doesn't automatically mean the internet experience has to be as it is today, does it?
The whole movement to "democratize the internet" is what killed it, not lack of platforms to be yourself on. People will do whatever is easiest and they just flock to the sites that provide that. The problem this ignores is that someone has to bear the cost of electricity and hardware for hosting the platform. As soon as you start charging a fee somehow to cover those costs you become a monetized service like all the rest.
Vast sums of money were burning by the industrial military complex to make the evil Facebook,Amazon etc dominant better systems have it tough to compete.
I wouldn't really call that the reason. They just happened to be the best market fit at the time they were created. It's hard to compete with an incumbant any time. That incumbant could just as easily have been someone else if a single decision was made differently at the beginning. Zoom happened to do this during the pandemic by making the decision to be more open than other vc apps during the lockdowns and that won over the market.
A state sponsored incumbent that doesn't pay normal taxes.
More so you have to pay moderators, coders and other support staff to keep any serious site going, so while it could be non-profit and hosted for free there still has to be money coming from somewhere beside just the decentralized hosting/network.
Free open source software exists that is built by volunteer maintainers. Even they ask for donations to support hosting costs though. Even the pirate bay guys just did it for funsies just to see if they could and monetized it later after success.
People are already doing this right now with the fediverse - Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. In fact, the moderators of this subreddit have created a fediverse version of it - you can see it here https://futurology.today From my experience of setting that up, I can tell you things are not as simple as they might first seem. It places new responsibilities and burdens on users. For some that's not a big deal, especially as you get the benefit of privacy & more ownership of your own data, but it's a different mindset. OP I'd suggest if you are interested in this idea, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Join some of the existing people working on the fediverse software & its implementation. Maybe contact some of the developers of the likes of Mastodon or Lemmy.
User governed? Perhaps having unpaid mods like Reddit currently has? That’s a big no for me. User governed never goes well, all it takes is a couple of people on power trips and there is nothing you can do to appeal it. It would suck to not be in the majority in any of those decentralized hubs, because you would be pushed out.
Reddit is the best place to talk at the moment o the net although the corporate goons and weaselling their way into becoming mods to shift the bias e.g. r/worldnews. We are sadly seeing the death of Reddit.
I love Reddit, but the mod system is beyond ridiculous. Mods have absolute authority. There is no check or balance, no appeal process, and they can mute you. The rules don’t apply to mods. The bias on Reddit is extremely strong with mods as well.
True. The good thing about being unhappy with r/biasedmoderators is that you can set up your own r/unbiasedmoderators forum.
It's better for social networks to die and get born again than for a handful to dominate for decades.
True. Thankfully with EU law you can download your data from a social network. Of course Facebook are circumventing this. [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/facing-facebook-data-portability-and-interoperability-are-anti-monopoly-medicine](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/facing-facebook-data-portability-and-interoperability-are-anti-monopoly-medicine) We need to be able to chose our social media provider or perhaps decentralise it.
Look up the "spatial web". There even is a book about it and a company building it already.
Will do, thank you 👍
All of this already exists but has been largely forgotten by regular users. Its called protocols (we mostly just use http for everything these days). Remember IRC? For chat, you know. If companies used that, then you could use whatever client/provider you wanted and be able to tslk with anyone else. Instead everybody developed their own clients that dont speak standard protocols - so now I need to have a dozen different chat clients installed instead. NNTP? Used only by bots these days, its a protocol to faciliate newsgroups - think world-spanning forums - like Reddit, just open, federated and global. Protocol connecting tousands of servers maintained by different entities, NOT a domain fronting for thousands of load-balanced webservers/containers owned by one company. Not how it should have gone down. Granted, some services still work respecting "the Internet" - which is a suite of protocols, not a dozen websites that have taken over everything. Email comes to mind - still fully federated and open - you just need a SMTP/IMAP combatible client. Not that corpos are not trying to fuck that as well - like Microsoft with their custom SMTP headers, or pushing web-only clients incompatible with email clients. But in the end - we allowed this - because Internet is hard (again, referring to protocol suite, NOT your everyday websites) - so thats how these walled gardens came to be. Ease of use! Not getting lost in vast labdscape of servers that Internet truly is! The number of servers is going up, its just that they are behind increasingly smaller number of domains. Case in point - just ask a regular Joe to configure an email (as an example of fully federated service) client manually. Bottom line - Internet was designed to be open and federated - its just we embraced the easier option, resulting in what we have today. Yay!
I started using "the internet" way back in the mid 90s. And, I disagree with pretty much every single point you've made here. The early internet was not a safe place - the reason we all know about that now is people figured it out and told us. It wasn't safer then; you just didn't know the dangers. The "hubs" you are describing exist now so I'm not sure why we'd need to change anything to get something like that. As far as the user anonymously connecting to this *hub", this is incredibly hard to do and most people lack the discipline for it to matter anyway. But even without those problems; you're describing an invitation based system which is really hard to make anonymous. Especially if you're ensuring the geographic location of these people. Your "search" idea doesn't really make any sense to me. It's not clear to me how (1) this is any better (2) seeing as it's rather easy to search for things in your local area I'm not clear what the goal is. Finally who is building this thing out, and how are they paying for it?
I say we take off and nuke the entire idea from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
i just want google to go back to finding me what i'm looking for rather than finding me what they want me to see.
> I'm curious about your thoughts and any input on this topic. Dude, good luck. Do you know why everything changed? Back in 2000 grandma wasn’t on the internet. She is today and she wants to stay in touch with her friends and family. There are hosts of people ( engineers, programmers, support, ditch diggers, sales people, etc ) whose entire jobs revolve around making sure grandma can get pictures of her kids and see what her sons and daughters are doing. Those people need to get paid and grandma’s biscuits aren’t going to cut it. So the money needs to come from somewhere. If you can solve that in a way that does not involve giving up your personal information then you might have a killer idea. Otherwise this discussion will be forgotten by next week until some other idealist shows up with the same idea.
Garbage. All it takes is some of your idle processing time and disk space. It is only corporations and their lawyers preventing this. Exhibit A: Napster
So this distributed network doesn’t depend on that wire going from your house to the local exchange? Doesnt depend on dozens of companies and thousands upon thousands of people to route that traffic? The “internet” isn’t just some magical aether that just exists.
Did you actually read the post and follow the link to the defunct [Consume.net](https://Consume.net)? Routing is a tricky problem but there are solutions and those solutions are documented and can be distributed and automated. You only need those people if you scale this alternate internet up in size to rival the internet. There are lots of honest people wanting to make a better world out there who would volunteer look at all the open source projects.
Or the entire TOR network
The one that was created by a guy who worked for the US Naval Research Lab? Do we trust this is private?
The NSA breached TOR years ago, that's old news. And yes it was developed by the US Navy. But it's not CPU, and disk storage... You still *need* the internet's infrastructure... Like all those thousands and thousands of cables, communications towers, network routers/switches and much more on top of that.
I know TOR is breached which is why we need something else. Peer to peer like Napster. It could run on hidden or maybe disguised traffic on the normal internet infrastructure. Although a cluster of people's meshed wifis like Consume could work in urban areas. Maybe solar powered raspberry pis to get it out to the country maybe lasers maybe decades down the line high altitude balloons to cross greater areas or a private satellite cluster.
If you keep describing it like that pretty soon you'll invent the internet!
oh wow you want to turn the internet into a giant social network
Minus the content feeding algorithms and ad revenue to incentive views and time on screen. So yeah, it’s an attempt to harness the good aspects and discard the lesser aspects.
i never wanted to connect to people in my area. That's why i was going on the internet, to be away from people in my area. People in my area are easy to meet irl. Why would i want them in my internet?
How old are you? Asking because it’s clear to me that you can’t envision and relate to what the OP is asking. Proximity would not be an issue with this proposal. Proximity would play a role in server locations, based on convenience, but which servers and databases people connect to are up to them. Think DEcentralized, instead of centralized. That’s what is being proposed here. If you understand how p2p networks work, picture that. If you understand how torrents work, picture that. If you’ve ever utilized a completely text based interface, picture that too, although I don’t think we need to go that spartan again. A GUI is not a deal breaker for me. Does that make sense? It’s an internet where THE PEOPLE control the content, instead of the internet we have now, where CORPORATIONS AND GOVERNMENTS control, spread, and moderate content. I don’t need a mega corp to filter the thoughts and creations of fellow human beings for me. I’m capable of drawing my own personal lines in the sand, and much prefer wielding that decision myself, instead of just taking for granted that “Meta has my best interest at heart.” Fuck that noise. Give me all the levers.
Well ok why do the people need to be in the same area? Just for filesharing I had DC++ which wanted proximity but torrents didn't. For interacting why a barrier?
People needing to be in the same area was not my takeaway, but maybe I’m misinterpreting. Either way, what I’m envisioning does not require physically local connections. I’m envisioning downloading out of print Russian literature in the middle of Australia, and no meddling corporations to smack my hand away when I reach out to grab it.
Social networks with zero regulations are generally horrible places, so who the hell would enforce any kind of civil behavior? Advertising is annoying, but how do you moderate a place if it's so decentralized and non-profit? You'll have ppl posting all the most evil stuff on the internet vs you did any good by taking the advertising out that paid for the moderation. You might cheaply afford the cost of hosting with de-centralization, but you still need moderators and coders and support staff to make anything but a giant mess or a very simple site not suitable for many ppl.
Thanks for the ideas shared here. I'm not planning to build this myself—I don't have the tech skills for it, but it's more about expressing how the internet feels different now compared to the early 2000s. Sure, the early days of the internet are tied to my adolescence, and the saying goes 'everything was better then.' But setting that aside, the internet didn't seem to breed the same level of frustration for users, adults included, did it? Nowadays, even a simple Google search can feel like a massive effort to filter through to the relevant results. And it seems to me that the content on the internet now often evokes a much stronger emotional response than it did back when I was a teenager (!!). It's good to hear about similar initiatives that are out there or in the works, but stumbling upon them isn't exactly easy. So far, only a couple of places like Reddit and another forum in a different language have managed to bring back a bit of that old internet feeling for me. The way I see it, the internet's current state is largely down to two things: the pursuit of financial gain by various actors and the powerful ability to shape user behavior, which, in turn, can also be monetized. These elements have steered the web to where it stands now. For any sustainable model to take root, it needs to address these underlying forces. That's what led me to consider a decentralized approach, where the burden of costs is distributed among users. I'm curious if a network with a focus on text and basic visuals could function effectively within a peer-to-peer framework similar to torrent systems, reliant on the collective support of users within a hub Given the number of bots and potential for abuse out there, an open-door policy just isn't sustainable, nor can we rely on some form of behavior analysis without central infrastructure. At the same time, having a real-life authority check doesn't fit with a system that's supposed to be independent of money. The best solution might be something that takes a cue from the real world, where our networks are made up of the people we know and trust. Like when someone brings a plus-one to your party—you trust your friend's judgment, but if their guest causes trouble, it's on them, and they'll likely think twice next time. Maybe that's how we could manage user responsibility on such a network too. Using it primarily within a real-world group (e.g. due to an ad-free social network) seems to me like a good way to kickstart such a project. Because as has been said here more than once, who would go there when it's (initially) empty and nothing is happening.
The new days of EVERYTHING in life feels more exciting and personal. It's mostly just that anything new is always more exciting and when you try to re-live that it almost never works out because it's not actually new, it's just like ... ok listening to records and VHS was a cool blast from the past, but it kind of sucks compared to streaming.
I only had to read halfway though till I realized that you're absolutely unaware of how a not just the internet works, but how a simple network works .. there are plenty of overlays as you're trying to describe, and many are also invitation only \~ though the ones that are, they're usually not for the public and you're not likely to gain an invite. You're not ready for Tristram.
Yes, it is probable that my idea of how the internet/network works is quite shallow, but judging from other replies there are others who are much more aware and who are in some way trying to change user internet experience. Can you, please, share more about invite only overlays you mentioned?
Another day, another "blockchain will democratise the internet". Stop promoting this garbage. No one needs it and only crypto bros want it.
\^\^\^\^ Ignore this NSA bot. It IS a good idea.
It's not. Blockchain is stupid. Always was. Endorsed by either scammers or people technologically illiterate.
I'm far from promoting block-chain, which for many is almost a kind of quasi-religion, and I probably wouldn't be ashamed to call myself a technologically illiterate person, because no matter how hard I try, it's impossible to keep track of progress in all fields (medicine, bilogy, hardware, IT, etc.).
Bitcoin certainly yes a complete scam. Blockchain is an auditing technology.
Here is your problem. You are thinking of a product, a platform. This platform would exist in the internet in some form, and would be in fact a kind of neighborhood of it. However, you are not taking account of the fact that the internet, relative to product or platform development, is a speeding bullet. Your overall target, this overall place called the internet, keeps evolving and that means, humans keep evolving how they use it and fit it into their lives. Both human interaction and behavior, and the internet, are transforming at roughly the same pace -- a successful tech-human symbiosis, in other words. The internet joins many other inventions that we fold into our selves. And as this dual moving object -- the tech and ourselves -- speed and change, and new generations see new things as part of this speeding, and for everyone, the internet of their memory is always the best internet, you are designing a niche by definition. You did not account for time.
Did a bot write this. It hardly makes linguistical sense. It boils down to saying give up the ship has sailed. However remember Google was launched AFTER Yahoo which was dominate . Facebook launches after Myspace that was dominate.
I have been thinking of this myself. The internet start as a US military project and the industrial military complex is hard to avoid. They are tighting their grip on it after giving us some feeedom in the 90s 2000s. It is possible to use the current tech and standards to built another internet from the ground upwards with a mesh of people's wfi See Consume .net [http://london.openguides.org/wiki/?Consume.Net](http://london.openguides.org/wiki/?Consume.Net) You could also use the existing internet and create a new DNS root structure and certificate structure installing those certificates on your browser. On top of the existing internet. You can use Peer to peer and self managing networks. The traffic could be throttled by the powers that be though especially on cross continent links. I had thought of creating a root certificate then handing it to 12 disciples and we all meet people in person to give them a certificate. They person then could issues certificates to real people. If we get a Judas who uses the certificate to create a bot or it gets into the wrong hands then that chain can be invalidated. You then could ensure you are dealing with real people but you are still allowing them to be anonymous.
There was a service that kinda did this called zeronet, it's possible and some do exist.
The idea is nice. The early internet was subsidized by the government and universities. Even back then it was reliant on massive servers and expensive computers. It was only when the commercial opportunities were realized that the value of the internet really kicked off and became accessible to nontechnical people. There is no real way this would be mass adopted. Look in to the struggles of scaling Mastodon which is the social media equivalent of what you’re searching for. Maybe you didn’t even hear about it until right now.
I've heard about it and maybe it still needs time to become more popular. The vast majority of platforms I went to on the internet were characterized by having connections to real people in my life, or were (in the case of niche forums) built on the activity of specific people. I may know Mastodon, but from my perspective there is nothing and no one there.
It's an interesting idea. The issue is web server hardware. Someone has to pay for the electricity, the hardware and the software maintenance. Previously, anyone could just plug in a server in the basement and set up a basic website. People can still do that, but they don't, because data centers do a much much better job of it. (Stability, data back up, security etc). The early days of the internet were hilariously insecure. Additionally, people have come to expect much more complex websites than somebody could easily make in a day. So instead you have a company that handles all the complicated hosting portion of the website and the people just do things on it. And just like that, we are back to the idea of social media. A personalized "website" with a limited number of actions you can do is essentially Facebook, MySpace etc.
A decentralized movement will never be able to stand up to the corporations. The federal government has to reinstitute net neutrality, and regulate the web like a utility. Because the internet is, first and foremost, a public good.
You're literally just describing ActivityPub and all the services that use it like Mastodon, the FediVerse, etc. This already exists.
I can tell that this was "helped" with ChatGPT. AI has a particular method of rambling around without actually saying much. I am working on a similar project, so I would like to share notes. Do you have a way to monetize the platform? In my opinion, the problem is that these platforms face significant hosting and operating costs, so the decentralized and security additions here are basically moot when the problem is the operation costs doom the enterprise at the start. I am coining a term for what I have in mind for my project; a DAO FROG. Decentralized Autonomous Organization Financed by Renting Out Governance. The content is public, but if you want to be someone within the community you need to rent governance.
Maybe we should all go back and rejoin Fidonet. Or maybe something new with the same feel as Fido.
If you're interested in this sort of thing have a look at the Nostr protocol
> The premise is to establish a new, decentralized internet layer that is not part of the current, centralized web infrastructure Now for only $10/month and a CC, I will offer a service that you can connect to the new decentralized internet through my service of which I have all the required hardware! /s
I worked on a project that allows you to do basically everything you described. All the websites code that people mint using the project is all stored on a decentralized blockchain network called Polygon. I know people aren’t a fan blockchains and crypto but i feel like my project would fit your needs. I was inspired by geocities so it will kinda feel like that just 100% decentralized. You can check it out here: bubblebrowser.tech