| ▲ | I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet(inavoyage.blogspot.com) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 35 points by initramfs 3 hours ago | 30 comments | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | wmf 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | zokier an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | Animats an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | blfr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | sottol an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | numpad0 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
...may I suggest "Intelligent Software-Defined Network" as an acronym for the sake of giving it one | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | 13415 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | analogpixel an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||