[AuthAuth]

Its always trying to cut bloat. Cant someone have a vision for a better internet that better caters to modern use cases and utilizes modern tech stacks to deliver the best possible experience? I dont see any value in going back to 100kb web pages

[al_borland]

A significant amount of the bloat on the modern internet is to facilitate marketing and advertisements, not for the benefit of the user.

I often wonder if we see this downward spiral on sites, because their attempts to monetize increase their costs, which require them to increase monetization efforts, which increase…

If we stripped it back, how much would some of these sites really need to run?

Multimedia is inherently large, but there are a lot of diminishing returns as resolution and size increases.

[initramfs]

I agree with this, and think even chip designers are starting to rent transistor parcels to advertisers like NASCAR jacket patches.

But seriously, without anyone addressing the elephant in the room, there is no way to make the web simple as ad less.

The newspapers of the late 19th century did this with color page cartoons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Kid

People bought the newspaper for the cartoons rather than the ads, but the ads supported to printing costs. Eventually the competition became so fierce one of the news giants lowered their cost to 1 penny.

Maybe lightweight internet use is a skill that needs to be trained. But with a solid connection for working, I see this less prioritized.

[initramfs]

yes and no. I agree there is some amazing things that can be done with larger websites, but one has to wade through a lot of unoptimal sites to find the good ones.

[AuthAuth]

Correct me if im wrong, but arent you trying to introduce a space where its impossible for larger websites to exist thus everything is restricted to the bare minimum website features like its 1999. I do not see the point in that, to me the problem isnt a blog with fancy JS vs a blog with static text. Its about corporations exerting outsized amounts of control over how people interact with the web. I want the new web to solve that problem and also be able to serve 4k video.

[initramfs]

You can already do that. If your home page is a fediverse feed or client, the users provide the content without an algorithm. Many people who have a browser with a Google search bar might think corporations control a lot, but one can set a different browser, DNS, and search engine. The thing Steve Jobs did was simplify the out of the box experience, so when they bought a Mac, there'd only be a dock with Safari at the bottom. One could develop an open source machine with a very unitary goal of accessing a lightweight web using a protocol or extension similar to No script but the average non-technical user might not know how to do that.

Of the many Linux distros I've tested, maybe a handful are actually easy to use and not heavy. One example is Bodhi Linux. But I have something more like Tiny Core Linux in mind, except polished (it features a dock, surprisingly). If the hardware could be developed for this too as open hardware, there would be the added advantage of it having more ways to improve it. I'm a bit oxymoronic in having a vertically integrated product idea and an open source bias, but a lot of great ideas need a coherent outline, which sometimes start out as closed source.

If the project starts out with enthusiasm but it gets forked, then it becomes impossible to develop one feature that many people didn't realize would be overall a better user experience, or streamlined option, at the very least.