I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet

101

iinitramfs 1 day ago 121 commentsRead Article on inavoyage.blogspot.com

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sottol•1 day ago

I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser.

I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:

- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.

- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.

- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.

A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.

initramfs•1 day ago

You have the right ideas, and there are protocols that do this, some more isolationist than others: https://yesterweb.org/zine/issue-05/08/ "The Web Outside the Net" and https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/SmolNet

Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html

zjbt•about 11 hours ago

Some of that sounds like Hyphanet (a.k.a. Freenet): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphanet

dccoolgai•1 day ago

I've been thinking more lately about how to get "Basic Web" - just like normal HTML and maybe a little bit of CSS (No Service Workers, Background Sync, DRM, etc.) and make it work over a LORA/Meshtastic rig somehow.

initramfs•about 23 hours ago

It's becoming a dream and a curious or nearly unattainable goal, without being adjacent a very heavy software stack. But I think having a separate screen on a phone, like a flip phone with a screen on each side, would help separate the two software and OSes that could run them. One light, and one heavy.

trashb•about 15 hours ago

Maybe you're overthinking it. Perhaps instead of creating a whole new stack, you just want to host a "personal blog" yourself. You could even consider creating a listing of similar sites you have found. If all people that want this kind of web host their own personal site I suspect it come to reality. There are of course already several collections of sites like this, 1mb.club 10kb.club nocss.club tilde.town wiby.com sdf.org and more.

You could also consider Gopher or Gemini to find like minded individuals.

oso2k•about 21 hours ago

I think we could learn from an old (gone?!) Google+ post from Ian Hickson on what could possibly replace HTML but a lot of the criteria applies to Web/Internet as a whole (https://www.sitepoint.com/will-html-ever-be-replaced/).

   Ian Hickson (“Hixie” — WHATWG specification editor, CSS2.1 co-editor and Google’s W3C representative) recently published an interesting post on Google+. He’s occasionally contacted by people suggesting a better alternative to HTML but, in all cases, none have come close. Ian states that any technology would need to satisfy at least five objectives to displace existing web technologies:

   Be devoid of licensing requirements.
   Be vendor-neutral and accept input from everyone.
   Be device and media-neutral; it should work on PCs, TVs, mobiles, tablets, screen readers and any future hardware.
   Be content-neutral and not restrict itself to types of document or application.
   Be radically better than the existing web in every way; faster, more usable, more features, easier to develop, easier to monetize, etc.


   HTML can fail objectives two and three. Technologies such as XHTML2 and XForms only satisfied one and three. Java and Flash struggle in all areas — and I’d also add Google’s Dart to that list.

Maybe this all means there’s a place on the net for gopher, Gemini protocol, or tilde.town or ssh BBSes?

xg15•about 11 hours ago

> Java and Flash struggle in all areas

Worth noting that Flash did succeed: It was widely used across the web and installed by enough web users that sites could usually assume it was available (though it was considerate to provide fallback content) - that even though it needed a separate installation step!

It took a conscious effort by browser vendors and Adobe to kill it and replace it with other technologies. Maybe for good reasons, but it was definitely not a "free market" development.

I also find the list a bit weird and even hypocritical in places, as, like you say, HTML itself doesn't pass all criteria.

I'd also question other points for the general usefulness as an alternative: Why does an alternative tech necessarily have to accept input from everyone? Not even open source projects do that.

Also, why does it have to be content-neutral and have to support any kind of application? Pre-web technologies generally were "host neutral" - they let you connect to any host that supported the protocol - but the protocol usually had very well-defined application semantics. It seems instead of trying to "boil the ocean", a better way would be to focus on specific domains that could benefit from alternative technologies the most.

Be device and media-neutral: Just to note, Apple only allows single-purpose apps and points to Safari for everything else. They literally forbid anyone from trying to promote any "alternative web" unless they have a say in it.

(Not quite sure about the Play Store right now, but they likely do something similar)

So taken strictly, thay point would be a nonstarter unless you already have connection to the higher-ups of current Big Tech companies.

oso2k•about 4 hours ago

Flash succeeding is subjective. There were many who were hostile to Flash (and Java) for a long time. I actively disabled the Flash plugin except when necessary.

HTML not passing the criteria doesn't negate it from being the current leading technology. All it indicates is that there could be a technology that does more (most) of these things better. And, it sets a certain benchmark for the next technology to aspire to.

I think accepting input from anyone is a resiliency feature. Imagine if only Governments drove the Web? Or Multi-national Megacorps? Billionaires? Choice and freedom helps to democratize and enable usage by participants who are diadvantaged.

Content-neutrality is experiential. That is to say, gopher is well known to be more organizationally efficient at transimitting data than http. However, it was primarily aimed at text transmission and was very poor at supporting applications (like banking, commerce sites or email). These were huge boons to the current Web.

xg15•about 4 hours ago

> Flash succeeding is subjective. There were many who were hostile to Flash (and Java) for a long time. I actively disabled the Flash plugin except when necessary.

I would define "succeeding" as "having overcome the chicken/egg problem, having a wide enough support as to be practically usable as infrastructure and enough content/use that it is relevant", regardless of how well liked a technology is.

E.g. I think JavaScript very clearly succeeded on the web, even though many people still turn it off and there are a lot of good reasons to. By that logic I think Flash had succeeded as well.

Rohansi•about 18 hours ago

> Maybe this all means there’s a place on the net for gopher, Gemini protocol, or tilde.town or ssh BBSes?

All of those fail #5 for sure. And that's one of the most important points to bring in users IMO.

We all (hopefully) know the world would be a better place with less JS but you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

trashb•about 15 hours ago

Seems like the whole "no tracking, no targeted advertisements" is a great feature of Gopher & Gemini. BBSes do tracking but it seems rarely used for advertisement its more distributed anyway so if you don't like a BBS you can move to the next one connected to the same messaging networks.

Then there is also the communities, increased accessibility (it's just text) and the more structured nature of the "sites" which may be a feature.

So I would argue that there is definitely some benefits (for the user) to those alternative protocols.

NoGravitas•about 10 hours ago

Part of #5, "easy to monetize" leads inevitably to "easy to enshittify". I think this is a point that's not generally well enough understood. If a platform emphasizes monetization, its early adopters will all be grifters and it will provide no benefit to anyone else (cf blockchain).

Gemini and Gopher fail #4 because they aren't application platforms. But I think we probably need to step back and rethink the "deliver sandboxed application that you run automatically" use case. If we really want to still do that, we might want to design something for that purpose from the start. But we might also come to the conclusion that it's fundamentally not a good idea.

oso2k•about 4 hours ago

I'd presume we're almost all using the Web primarily on some employer's dime (except where we are self-employed but it still applies). Prior to the Web 1.0, I remember interacting with people/managers that discouraged reading email or news or forums or other casual/non-work uses of the Web. I remember articles about employers allowing their programmers to read their email "up to" 2 hours per day. Now we're expected to have rapid response/access to email, slack, SMS, etc.

I believe this is because the commercialization/monetization of Web usage is beneficial to commercial entities. If that isn't possible, then the few who build the Web aren't able to build it in the first place. It's akin OSS and concepts of commercialization in the GPL. You can't create equity if there is no method to transfer value.

account42•about 8 hours ago

#5 is entirely subjective and IMO impossible to fully satisfy as the different sub-clauses conflict.

xtiansimon•about 12 hours ago

> “…you can't put the genie back in the bottle.”

Not for nothing, if you’re “building a new internet” you can do whatever you wish.

trumpdong•about 12 hours ago

You fail criterion four: you're limiting what kinds of documents and applications can be developed.

notanastronaut•about 9 hours ago

I actually prefer if whatever comes next does not include #5. I'd rather Project Gemini stay the way it is versus every website trying to browse my local storage, troll my localhost sockets, and use any scripting, to be honest. For me, personally, as my own choice, HTML+CSS and no scripting, especially third party scripting, is my kind of WWW replacement.

And this might be unpopular here, but monetizing the 'Net (advertising) is what got us in this Dystopian Digital environment in the first place.

oso2k•about 4 hours ago

I agree. It's also the evil that created the need and improvements like SSL/TLS, ssh, gzip, bzip2, lz4, Linux, etc. and so many other worthwhile innovations.

lukan•about 15 hours ago

"We all (hopefully) know the world would be a better place with less JS but you can't put the genie back in the bottle."

I don't know that.

I suspect you hate javascript because so many ads and tracking software is written with it? Replace JS with something better and the ads will just be written in that.

Otherwise JS .. works and is simple. And compiling any language to wasm very doable nowdays. What would be the alternative?

(Personally I would like to see TS native in the browser)

Rohansi•about 6 hours ago

Reasons vary per person but personally it's more about bloat. JS as it's used today is very different compared to its initial use case. We build entire applications in JS now, which is cool, but we do this by treating JS as a build target. The code we write is not executed as-is by the browser, it is transpiled and bundled up first. It's way too late to change now but I'd prefer something that embraced application development so that you don't need to pull in React/Vue/whatever and do all of this. Something more opinionated like what we use for native apps, but with the flexibility of HTML+CSS.

jhbadger•about 12 hours ago

"works and is simple"? You can argue JS works by definition because it is what people use, but it is far from simple -- JS and C++ are basically the only two programming languages where books plead with you not to use all their features but use a more maintainable subset.

account42•about 8 hours ago

I mainly hate JS because when I go on the web I want to view documents with maybe simple forms for interaction and not complex applications. It's not the implementation that's the problem but giving websites compute capability without explicit permission.

theandrewbailey•about 13 hours ago

> Ian Hickson (“Hixie” — WHATWG specification editor, CSS2.1 co-editor and Google’s W3C representative)

How long after this post did AMP come out? Three years?

trumpdong•about 12 hours ago

Two is impossible unless you want to be overrun by spam. Three and four are incompatible. Five is not a real criterion, it's a pipe dream.

scared_together•about 17 hours ago

Point #5 seems near impossible and even furthermore undesirable. Unless we are envisioning an application with all the characteristics of a web browser, but using different layout languages.

chicken-stew•about 16 hours ago

Maybe he overlooked a requirement because it’s so obvious:

Be human readable

initramfs•about 20 hours ago

Interesting link! I haven't heard of him, but I didn't have a new protocol in mind per se, since there are many old ones that are still good. But I would have removed the :// from http:// since even Tim Berners-Lee admitted that wasn't needed. I think HTML5 was an improvement from Flash, but there's a lot in the old web, like Xerox Star that had a smooth resolution in the files. Something like LaTeX..

rapnie•about 18 hours ago

I first heard of him via "Towards a Modern Web Stack (Ian 'Hixie' Hickson)" on HN [0]. Quite interesting. Note that the submission link is broken, the google doc link is added below [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...

chrismorgan•about 13 hours ago

And that concept was bonkers, proof conclusive that he had lost the plot—if his involvement with and endorsement of canvas-only Flutter wasn’t proof enough—and should be ignored completely until he comes to his senses.

The obvious benchmark would be: can you implement an HTML/CSS/JS browser inside this environment and have it behave identically to the browser’s own HTML/CSS/JS? And the answer is: not a chance. WASM + WebGPU + ARIA + WebHID is simply not enough. Browsers provide a lot of functionality in ways that web content cannot see or interact with. Some of it could be mapped, other parts of it never can be, for security/privacy reasons. And the more you want to map, the bigger your spec gets, until you’ve added every diverse feature from every OS to the web’s API surface—and then you stop browsers from adding new functionality, too.

Some examples of things that can’t be implemented in web content (most fundamentally, one or two merely currently): Native text rendering in this WebGPU world. Links with all their functionality. Native font preferences. Text selection and its interactions with native platform functionality (including things like context menus). Native scrolling behaviour. The browser as a compositor (important for things like scrolling and video performance). Browser extensions (the user agency part of that first scathing comment).

throwaway7356•about 17 hours ago

> Maybe this all means there’s a place on the net for gopher, Gemini protocol, or tilde.town or ssh BBSes?

By your question (and Betteridge's law of headlines): no, as they fail at least (2), (4) and (5).

trashb•about 15 hours ago

> as they fail at least (2), (4) and (5).

Can you explain how you see that they fail 2 and 4?

To me it seems with Gemini, Gopher and BBSes (tilde.town is html so let's skip that) they can serve any type of content they want and you can probably already connect to it and retrieve something readable.

taneq•about 18 hours ago

I’d say Markdown meets every one of those criteria except “more features” (which is a feature IMO) and “easier to monetise” (which is another feature. :D )

al_borland•about 13 hours ago

You mention it fails number 5, but I think Markdown also fails number 4. It’s pretty restrictive with the types of documents it can create. It’s HTML and traditional web technologies that gives it the illusion of flexibility.

To be displayed in a pleasing way to most humans, it’s also rendered as HTML, usually with some kind of styling. In a world without HTML, what is Markdown going to use?

jhbadger•about 12 hours ago

LaTeX? That's actually the primary use case I've seen for markdown -- to write papers/presentations/code notebooks in markdown that are then turned into LaTeX for typesetting.

anenefan•about 24 hours ago

No need to rebuild from ground up, sites just need a low data bandwidth fall back, perhaps with a new html tag indicating user is needing low bandwidth - much like sites used to provide a mobile ready area that was the same page load but simplified somewhat.

For the bleakest of disasters, bandwidth would be a premium but a lot can still be done without bandwidth hogging scrip overheads, so site developers just need to include a low bandwidth fall back for the basics - I dare say it might even be lest costly for the LLM scrapers if it were widly adopted. I'd suggest for an idea of basics touring some sites where each page has a small footprint [1] [2] [3] [4] ... I recall days on dialup 3 KB/s - a meg was a wait-a-while.

However I don't hold much hope, generally, things only happen out of necessity.

[1] https://github.com/bradleytaunt/1kb.club

[2] https://250kb.club/

[3] https://512kb.club/

[4] https://1mb.club/

initramfs•about 23 hours ago

I also contributed to one of those clubs.

There's also 10KB club: https://github.com/spxy/10kbclub https://github.com/marcus0x62/tinyblog

trashb•about 15 hours ago

there is a whole lot out there. I personally like the following two also:

https://nocss.club/

https://no-html.club/index.txt (seems to be offline atm but archive.org has a captured version)

zokier•1 day ago

I'm struggling to understand what the concrete proposal here is.

> So what is Thinnernet? Imagine a fiber optic bundle of undersea cables- maybe a hundred or so 10Gbps cables comprising....

and the question goes unanswered. is it a protocol? physical layer? guideline? no idea.

initramfs•1 day ago

It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

protocolture•1 day ago

I still don't get it. I came here to make much the same comment as you are replying to.

Unless you mean that your parallel internet is just the regular internet but with the protocols you personally like? So its more of a web thing where you promote sites that aren't bloated?

> so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion.

I don't know that demanding someone like Hurricane Electric to use QoS is going to have a desirable outcome. Is this more a government thing? Forcing T1s to use QoS? My gut tells me that ignoring QoS markers saves them an appreciable amount of CPU, and also lets them act more neutrally.

How do I as a carrier service your "Thinnernet". How "Parallel" is the infrastructure? Do I have to buy capacity or can we peer? Do I have to maintain a separate routing table? Do you use BGP or something else? Are you planning to buy L2 international capacity to "Replace" T1's? What do you do if a carrier starts sending everything as EF? Is there a PoC node or network operating anywhere?

I just don't see anything in here except for broad references to undersea cables and UX.

initramfs•about 24 hours ago

the references are metaphorical. App developers like Facebook have Lite versions of their Messenger. No actualy physical sectoring or allocation needs to take place. What it's emphazing is that App developers have a liteweight mode. Google got rid of their HTML page version when checking GMail on the web in 2024. Their app still works relatively fast, but on a 128KBps connection, loading a single page on the Javascript only desktop browser version is really, really slow. Like 5-10 minutes slow. I wrote more in another response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48453653

The Symbian phones from Nokia and Sony were ultra-efficient. Not everyone remembers that era, but they were real time operating systems that ensured tasks got completed in a certain time, including user-prompted inputs. It's not a technical limitation of a company or service, but a lot of their revenue might depend on a minimum number of ads or cookies and web analytic trackers being visible on a page. Often in the numbers of 30 or 100+. With all those elements removed from a site, the service might not bring in much revenue. So it's not really an issue of technical capability, but a business model.

Personal blogs don't typically have this issue, as they can be hosted on a small home server, or a remote server, and aren't concerned as much with ads. I can't suggest how the internet should be run, and the article does acknowledge the benefits of a decentralized web. But predictability of content delivery ETA from internet speeds is not an impossible thing to optimize towards, even if uptime isn't above 99%. What is somewhat novel in this proposal is standardizing a subset of typical website activities, like checking news, weather and mail, and getting a more predictable completion time for certain tasks, but factoring in known latencies from wireless providers (as pings will not be as low as a wired connection), and lowering the average latency for the round trip.

On a much larger scale of interactions- but again the web is so wide and varied, that most of those things cannot be standardized, nor should. But kind of like measuring the commute time of an expressway in a city, or subway trips to a grocery. Things that people need and won't optimize more with an Uber. Hence measuring static over HTML is an easy test, and more sophisticated web services can and do have those kinds of benchmarks. But integrating the device, ISP, and server in a way where certain activities can get slightly preferential treatment like ordering and picking up a prescription at a pharmacy, setting appointments with a doctor, would not get deprioritized bandwidth compared to someone streaming something in 4k, and maybe temporarily limiting that other user's bandwidth to 1440p for maybe a few minutes.

So I do think a tiny bit of QoS or speed throttling is needed only in exceptional cases, but for the most part, the typical user wouldn't notice or necessarily need that level of speed adjustment. Most of the optimization would take place at the software, website, and OS level.

Animats•1 day ago

Core idea from this: we do need something that discourages web page bloat. The last try at this was Google AMP, which didn't go over well with either site operators or users. Any better ideas?

initramfs•about 15 hours ago

AMP was controversial because it initially prioritized Top Stories cached on Google servers as opposed to other operators, but its nominally open source spec eventually allowed other sites to improve their ad optimize revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages#Monet...

I think its current issue with AMP is that it makes the web seem flattened, with pages appearing more the same than having more independent formats. I think that if the average page can be smaller than the average AMP standard e.g less than 1.5MB, then a CDN wouldn't need to prioritize AMP.

A friend of mine referenced the 64KB demoscene competitions, which were creative use of video graphics.https://64k-scene.github.io/

250KB Club seems like a nice place to start with websites: https://250kb.club/

arjie•1 day ago

To be honest, one thing I've been interested in is a totally markdown-only web. You leave everything the same, you just use a Markweb browser as the only thing and it only accesses text/markdown. Then I build Yet Another Protocol Bridge for my blog and no one visits it ever again. That sounds like fun.

Animats•1 day ago

The trouble is, people keep extending Markdown to add HTML features. There's even Javascript embedded in Markdown.[1] You'd just create churn, not a fix.

[1] https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html

OkayPhysicist•1 day ago

There is no "adding HTML features" to Markdown. Markdown is a superset of HTML. You can simply put HTML tags (including script tags) in your Markdown.

frogperson•1 day ago

Check out the gemini:// protocal. There are browsers, search engines, and the whole thing is basically markdown.

its a cool idea, but lacks content. Discoverability is kinda bad as well. All fixable problems. I think it could take off given some good content.

arjie•1 day ago

Haha that’s what I was joking about. I already have a Gemini bridge at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev and I’ve had maybe two days in its history with any visitors. Funny.

akkartik•about 15 hours ago

You're looking for Moss.

https://mastodon.social/@xmunch/115822364073874855

What protocols does your blog bridge to?

initramfs•about 9 hours ago

Moss looks great.

I use LaGrange and Kristall, which support multiple protocols.

e12e•about 12 hours ago

Maybe take some inspiration from wap?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

Although with supercomputers in wrist watches, I'm not sure we need a new standard - html and css works fine across devices - if used with some care?

initramfs•about 9 hours ago

Yes, I've used WAP on my Nokia phones. I would really like to bring something from the Symbian era, and covered J2ME in a series of posts from the days before: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba...

initramfs•about 6 hours ago

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

t0mas88•1 day ago

Adblockers. On a lot of sites a significant portion of the bloat is from third party ads and tracking.

dnautics•1 day ago

gemini gave it the old college try

bigbuppo•about 24 hours ago

ANGH as long as marketing people are allowed to control the narrative.

aleph_minus_one•about 16 hours ago

I have the impression that the author does not want to build a parallel internet (which involves whole new protocols replacing, say, IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4, ICMPv6, DNS, perhaps TLS, ...), but rather another application-level protocol replacing HTTP and the web.

Remember that the world wide web is just one of insanely many application-level protocols that can be run over the internet infrastructure.

initramfs•about 10 hours ago

Correct. The idea is to narrow the application access view from the desktop or home screen of a mobile device to a limited set of optimized apps and protocols that can traverse the web. It's kind of like a dedicated bike lane alongside a boulevard in a major city. One can bike as fast if not faster than cars, but they'd need to adhere to the rules of the bike path.

majicDave•about 17 hours ago

I have been working on an alternative to http, and the thinking comes from the same place, thank you for sharing. I still have a way to go, but it's definitely possible, and it is definitely a good idea, I'm very excited about http alternatives in general, we should have many.

https://github.com/mjdave/katipo

fhn•about 17 hours ago

thanks for being MITM

majicDave•about 16 hours ago

Not sure I understand exactly, but I have no desire to host trackers, the idea is that either the client or the host will be hosting their own trackers, or going through some third party trusted tracker hosting service.

trumpdong•about 11 hours ago

So a tracker is what you called a router. Weird name.

initramfs•about 9 hours ago

Awesome. Starred.

AuthAuth•about 24 hours ago

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•about 13 hours ago

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•about 8 hours ago

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•about 22 hours ago

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•about 22 hours ago

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•about 9 hours ago

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.

1970-01-01•about 20 hours ago

So Internet2, but with less research?

https://internet2.edu/network/

tancop•about 16 hours ago

what about going in the other direction? apps instead of sites. wasm for everything, shared immutable libraries, strict capability based security. client side rendering where you can choose between html+css, new binary formats or doing everything from code. easy server overrides so you can redirect all requests from bigtech.com to service.mydomain.net without the app ever knowing. encourage federation and sharing instead of isolation (but thats more of a culture problem new tech cant really solve). put the user back in control.

spacebacon•about 12 hours ago

This seems like the natural direction for me.

voidUpdate•about 16 hours ago

I feel like I missed where exactly the parallel part splits. Do they want to make new wires? New fibre protocols? A new TCP/IP stack? Just make another Gopher/Gemini?

initramfs•about 9 hours ago

It's more like a virtual network alongside the actual one, with a dedicated bike path separated by a curb and a sidewalk.

bigbuppo•about 24 hours ago

At least it's not the IPv8 guy again.

acuozzo•about 19 hours ago

Can you pay for The Thinnernet with Thnickels? https://thick-coins.net

kangaroozach•about 16 hours ago

https://reticulum.network/

blfr•1 day ago

The coordination and discipline required to build it is quite simply not there (or here, or anywhere). We will sooner have multi-gigabit space internet or 7G.

mjs06•1 day ago

Agree with many of your points (especially on how Steve jobs would have obsessed on this topic), but how do you think it reaches the masses?

milleramp•1 day ago

Through a series of tubes.

initramfs•1 day ago

by train. The internet train. :)

card_zero•1 day ago

That would be high bandwidth and high latency, which might be the opposite of what's being proposed in the article. (It's difficult to be certain what's being proposed in the article. I'm fairly sure the article is about internet, beyond that point all is guesswork.)

initramfs•1 day ago

I wrote a number of articles that try to address the many stacks of the application, transport, and OS layers. The best platform I can think of are the mid 2000's Symbian S60 phones, which were Real Time Operating Systems and used J2ME: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba...

There are new Java'based platforms that could build upon that, but chips today have so much processing power that they might think it's easier to develop a higher level language with more dependencies. But that leads to more maintenance if some package gets lost or broken.

As for the internet speeds themselves, It is similar to net neutrality but a voluntary guideline by the website developers: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sierpinski-triang...

I also explore QUIC, but it's already implemented and not everything needs it, except higher bandwidth: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-d...

Once Android and iOS became the leading smartphone makers, code efficiency wasn't super important, because they hardware makers could add 10-20X the RAM. The competition between Symbian and iOS was a brief decade, but it actually made efficient code development interesting and beneficial for battery life. Since RAM got cheaper, even though it's expensive at the high end (HBM3e), it's a lot easier to develop with 4GB of phone memory than 4MB on the Nokia 7650 (2002). Those are quite extremes, but most symbian phones had a lot of features with as little as 32MB of RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650

mjs06•1 day ago

I'm waiting at the station. Tell me when you arrive.

MrDOS•1 day ago

> There is a funny email that had been released after before Jobs's passing where a user complained of a spotty signal, and his advice was basically to not hold the phone in that direction (or with his hand over the top part where the antenna was positioned).

Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]?

> because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control

If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo.

> had Jobs lived to 70 or 80

Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna

1: https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...

initramfs•about 23 hours ago

Yes, I now realize it was the antennagate story. I included a link to a Slate article that featured an even more unsympathetic writer, which was in 2010, a year before Jobs died.

In retrospect, I think Jobs knew his time was limited, and telling a customer not to hold it that way wasn't an unforgiveable sin- in fact, there was some truth to it, even if they didn't have a better modem at the time (my article mentions Qualcomm).

And I agree, that yes, hubris is real. I like how Bill Gates told Jobs at the D7 Conference in 2007 that his charisma and spell wouldn't work on him because he was a minor wizard. https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-steve-jobs-w...

Btw, an in-house modem is something Apple us finally returning to, now that they are ready: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2026/05/16/iphone-1...

13415•1 day ago

Personally, I think Reticulum is the parallel Internet. It could even replace the Internet Protocol, and whatever the IP protocol connects is in my view the Internet.

initramfs•about 22 hours ago

there's also the network effect to deal with. The Internet is a WAN of WANs. you might have a great parallel Meshtastic network, but if few people are using it, its range might be limited.

numpad0•1 day ago

...may I suggest "Intelligent Software-Defined Network" as an acronym for the sake of giving it one

initramfs•about 22 hours ago

I haven't heard of that, but thanks. I have heard of Software Defined Hardware- I guess Networks are a type of hardware (SDH).

numpad0•about 19 hours ago

I mean, a slow, deterministic, latency focused network standards sounds a lot like ISDN and ATM(Asynchronous Transfer Mode) standards... there were such lost competitors to Ethernet, HTTP, HTML, etc.

charcircuit•about 13 hours ago

Why not use those extra fiber optic cables as part of the actual internet? You can immediately start making money off of it due to people getting legitimate value from it. If other lines were to be cut or have issues your lines would act as a backup. And yes if things got overloaded it would act slower. It seems unoptimal to make a completely separate network.

spencerflem•about 14 hours ago

I don’t understand the vision in the blog post, but I’m very excited to try out the Arcan-net as described in http://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/

analogpixel•1 day ago

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.pngs

trashb•about 15 hours ago

That page does not load for me, did you mean https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png or https://xkcd.com/927/

analogpixel•about 10 hours ago

yup, https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png... Guess I need to update my Alfred Snippet macro for !!standards.

initramfs•about 6 hours ago

my challenge for the past 6 years has been trying to prove XKCD's conventional comic panel on that wrong :)

analogpixel•34 minutes ago

Have you considered making your own comic that every can reference for this... wait.. nevermind.

wmf•1 day ago

I tune out at this "what Steve Jobs would have done" talk. A thing needs to stand on its own without borrowing Steve Jobs (or Jeff Dean as I saw someone do the other day).

HerbManic•1 day ago

Pretty much, we don't know what Steve would have done and even if we did, there is no guarantee that it was a good idea. When he had hits, it was brilliant but there were many stinkers as well.

I suspect if Steve was doing a new internet it would be a walled garden like the App store, so a worse internet that favors him. As Woz said, Jobs just wanted to have a business and be rich, didn't really matter what the business was. Any illusion of a greater good was always a calculated bet in getting more users.

Job's did some great things for the industry, I also call him the architect of the locked down digital jails we are inhabiting. But we shouldn't put him up as some perfect beacon of the industry.

initramfs•1 day ago

I get that, but a lot of design decisions today are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee

For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.

wmf•1 day ago

That sounds like a false dichotomy. You want opinionated software? Great, so do I. Design the software, own your decisions yourself, and explain your thinking without shortcuts.

thwgrw•1 day ago

I mean can't get a more incestous tech cliche! There is a world out there too folks.

bigyabai•1 day ago

The VC Approved™ Software Validation Lifecycle:

            →  What would Steve Jobs do?  \
          /                                |
         |                                 ↓ 
  What would Steve Jobs do?    What would Steve Jobs do?
         ↑                                 |
         |                                /
          \  What would Steve Jobs do?  ←

initramfs•1 day ago

You're listening to WWSJD, the Los Altos FM station where Apple pilgrims tune in to the station that Steve Jobs did!

cyanydeez•1 day ago

Also, steve jobs made utterly stupid decisions in a lot of areas. If you're trying to revolutionize something, try not to use someone who was clearly flawed in many aspects. Otherwise it sounds like you're just building a facade.

initramfs•1 day ago

Yes, and Seward also made a Folly. I suppose he missed out on some things, but his success rate at predicting features that are now standard was higher than most in that era.

wombat-man•1 day ago

Yeah, reading his biography was interesting. He had the problem of tech not quite being where he wanted it to be over and over. But eventually things really hit.