[rv-de]

I wonder if it was possible to establish a para-web. It should be designed to work with very low bandwidth and have a mashable infrastructure - like based on smartphones, rpis, generally cheap and buildable by competent independent folks.

The appeal of the low bandwidth - which should be enforced by design - would be a very text-based communication which would attract user-profiles similar to those prevalent during the early days of the internet.

This would also prevent/discourage abuse for exchanging c/p or movie torrenting.

Also the mashability would make the network resilient against infrastructure breakdowns, government censorship and corporate copyright abuse.

By keeping the specs open all sorts of interfaces could be created by so-inclined users. Amateur radio people might use that network for hops and interface it via antennas. Utilizing electric infrastructure might be possible. Bluetooth repeater. Simplex where necessary and duplex where possible.

I'm not really competent in this area at all. But it seems doable to me if there are enough people dedicating to it.

---

I'm very privacy conscious but I can see how society perceives the internet no longer as something compatible with the values of the open web but instead as infrastructure which requires protection and regulation. Yes, I think the gov should have the right to execute search warrants (assuming the we're talking about democratic processes at play) and read through letters and documents. And disk content, mails, chat protocols are just that - only digital. But every power needs a balancing antagonizing power. And with surveillance getting more and more capable I fear this is going to get progressively difficult to do on the conventional internet.

[smitty1e]

As a technical matter, the 1s and 0s can be made to do all manner of things, so: sure.

TFA's point, to summarize radically, is that the individual and the society remain in tension. Society tends to crush the individual.

But I'm more sanguine. I submit that humanity is a saturated, agitated solution with societies precipitating and breaking up continually.

What's to be feared is the loss of agitation, but that's beyond our scope, so do your best where you're situated.

[TeMPOraL]

> As a technical matter, the 1s and 0s can be made to do all manner of things, so: sure.

To make it explicit in context of:

>> This would also prevent/discourage abuse for exchanging c/p or movie torrenting.

Usenet is a system very similar to e-mail in terms of data exchange format; both are textual and originally intended to exchange plaintext. Both developed convenient forms of encoding arbitrary binary data. Today, Usenet is in fact used for piracy, and I wouldn't be surprised if c/p was present on some groups too.

[smitty1e]

More generally: technology is mechanism; evil is agency.

Doubtless someone can name the fallacy surrounding efforts to produce a closed-form technical solution to matters of agency.

Minimize? Sure. But as long as Bad Actor can fog a mirror, the potential for evil is present.

[TeMPOraL]

In my opinion, the Web going bad has nothing to do with the technical layer. The protocols are fine.

What destroys openness is commercialization. It's hard to make a business in an open environment, because you'd be relying on the good will of people whom you provide value. So everyone tries to lock everything down and set moats. For instance, a good chunk of non-openness of the web boils down to: you can't let people access your site programmatically, because they'll develop more ergonomic/efficient UIs to it, and suddenly masses stop visiting your site and viewing ads.

Openness works best if things are given away without strings attached. So if you have an open side-web, you'll need to set up a culture or a set of rules to protect it, and be prepared that they'll kill the commercial usefulness of it.

[chrisfinazzo]

In some ways the reverse is true as well.

It reminds me of a documentary I saw years ago about the origins of Linux. At one point, I think rms was quoted as saying that even the GPL had “room for (commercial) business to be done.”

Yet I suspect most companies balked at the idea once they discovered that using the GPL made everything under it open as well - there was no competitive advantage or differentiation left once that happened.

[boomlinde]

You can already network smartphones, Raspberry Pis and generally cheap and buildable hardware using IP. IP is transport agnostic and there are several projects to build IP networks over e.g. mesh radio transports.

Then there are application protocols for linked documents and menus that are decidedly simpler than HTTP+HTML like Gopher or the more recent and even less popular descendant Gemini.

The problem isn't so much the technology, but that people in general don't really mind the current state of affairs to the extent that they're going to do anything substantial about it. I could host a private encrypted chat or forum from home and governments and advertisers would be none the wiser about what goes on there. The network infrastructure is there and I have access to it. It's getting people to give up the perceived convenience of gigantic services that's hard.

[TeaDude]

I very much like this idea and have toyed around with it in my head for years.

MAYBE regular HTML and CSS could be allowed for some authentic geocities design but no JavaScript whatsoever.

Being able to run client side code has a lot of benefits but currently it's an unholy mess that would require a complete replacement (Which means depreciating basically everything currently online) to fix and even then the mere presence of client run code has been a double edged sword for years with resource hogging pages and nasty tracking/virus scripts. HTML5 has mitigated a lot of the need for stuff that would have previously needed JavaScript or Flash such as video so I don't think it'll be missed that badly.

E: Just realized that I pretty much described the tor default browser

[rv-de]

I think at the base of the development the protocols should be based. Where they are consumed is then up to experimentation.

[TeaDude]

Fair enough. I'm just spitballing stuff for potential future client software developers should someone ever go ahead with this idea.

[rv-de]

Same here. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already many projects aiming into that direction.

F.x.: https://prism-break.org/en/all/#mesh-networks, there's IRC, XMPP, ...

But those projects mostly seem to try to establish alternative internets / protocols mostly based on the conventional internet.

The active enforcement of low-bandwidth-use would in my opinion be the core concept. As soon as media can be transferred it's going down hill in many ways. I think usenet died this way. c/p, content sharing, viruses, spam, ... all that crap

[auggierose]

I don't know what spitballing is but it sounds disgusting.

[TeaDude]

A common term used in software development for "throwing crap at the wall"

My instincts tell me it was coined in the 90's amid the disgusting/edgy phase after the long "dad jokes" phase of the years before. (Unix, byte, nybble ...the list continues)

[0xdeadb00f]

> A common term used in software development for "throwing crap at the wall"

it's quite a common term outside of software development too.

Edit: googling the term, it seems to have been coined in as early as the 1930s: https://grammarist.com/idiom/spitballing/

[rakoo]

The whole movement of decentralized web has been thinking about that for years. One such promising example is dat and its featured tool, beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com/). Content is hosted on computers directly, exchanged in a peer-to-peer fashion. Control is given back to users, who can read any content they want, fork it and share a local copy with their own modified content, or create new content as they see fit.

However as others have said, I don't think the problem is technical, it's societal. It's hard enough to migrate users from one social network to the next, and you're essentially saying we need to migrate users from the whole web to another kind of web. The only way forward I see this thing happening in the large is if a big player steps up and does it for free for a large part of the population.... at which point we're back to square one

[decompiled_dev]

Have you heard of matrix? Your description reminded me of it. Its a open source instant messaging service that is protocol driven. Perhaps a bit less ambitious in scope that what you are describing, but seems to be a step in that direction at least.

https://matrix.org/

[qznc]

Just disable JavaScript in your browser.

The question is how a significant number of people can be made to use that.