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

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

initramfs

Comments (100)

  • oso2k
    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?
  • sottol
    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.
  • anenefan
    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/
  • zokier
    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.
  • Animats
    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?
  • tancop
    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.
  • 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
  • 1970-01-01
    So Internet2, but with less research?https://internet2.edu/network/
  • aleph_minus_one
    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.
  • majicDave
    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
  • acuozzo
    Can you pay for The Thinnernet with Thnickels? https://thick-coins.net
  • voidUpdate
    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?
  • kangaroozach
  • blfr
    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.
  • bigbuppo
    At least it's not the IPv8 guy again.
  • mjs06
    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?
  • MrDOS
    > 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 controlIf 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 80Jobs' 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#Antenna1: https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...
  • charcircuit
    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
    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/
  • 13415
    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.
  • numpad0
    ...may I suggest "Intelligent Software-Defined Network" as an acronym for the sake of giving it one
  • analogpixel
  • wmf
    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).
  • jocelyner
    [flagged]