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by dematz 21 days ago
Eh, idk if a totally new internet is either feasible or needed.

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.