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Comment by uniqueuid | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit to being extremely annoyed by web3 (due to javascript massively disempowering users, taking away things we used to be able to do).

But, I don't buy the gemini thing at all. Come on, gopher? That's not at all what the web was about. It's a false flag and the wrong ideal to look towards.

Even if you go back to Bush's "As We May Think", the focus was on making information accessible and editable using automation. There. That's the magic. Let's bring that back instead of a mere aesthetic.

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Gemini is a fun alternative; it's not supposed to be an ideal to look towards. The nice thing about Gemini is not so much its aesthetic as its human focus. It leans away from automation.

It sounds to me (and I may be wrong and picking up on the wrong things) that what you'd really like is something like Project Xanadu? Which is, unlike Web3, a reasonable position to hold, though it's one I strongly disagree with (I consider a fully realized and mainstream Xanadu as a Grim Meathook Future, though one not as thoroughly inhuman and extinctionist as Web3).

Got me there.

What I secretly wish for is a reliable all-encompassing technical reservoir of information without all the cruft that used to be unavoidable (books, libraries, lending, paper copiers, fees etc.). And a working human language that allows for deterministic logic on top. Yes, it's impossible, but some nights I allow myself to dream Frege's dream [1].

So to be realistic, I don't even need this all-embracing technology to exist. I just want current technology to not prevent me from building my own tiny pocket of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begriffsschrift

i’m currently reading Ted’s “literary machines” and fascinated by the description of xanadu, it lines up with a lot of my own intuition of the way things “should be”

i’m curious what comes across as so grim to you

A lot of the assumptions of Xanadu are incompatible with an open world. For a trivial example, bidirectional links require either a central authority, a burn-the-forests blockchain solution, or acceptance of the fact that every document will consist entirely of links to Viagra pharmacies. Unbreakable links (no 404s, no link-rot) implies the inability to ever remove anything from the system, which means no right to be forgotten, your bad takes will haunt you forever. (This lovely feature is implemented as "content-adressing" in some Web3 protocols.) Transclusion and transcopyright mean the whole system has to be surveilled to enforce IP law, and all expression is potentially financialized.

Basically, something like Xanadu would work very well as a personal system, or even a closed research system like a law library, but an open-world Xanadu would be even a worse hellscape than the Web-as-we-know-it.

Thanks, I agree that blockchain-permenance is undesirable (not to mention illegal in EU !)

Still, I do wish links were content-addressed to fight against link rot, but with individual users able to choose what files they want to keep seeding, as is the case now with torrents. I never saw the appeal of IPFS broadcasting every file I look at, but wouldn’t it be cool if archive.org’s job was made eaiser by a replication protocol, maybe something like Beaker’s Hyperdrive?

The way I see it, if someone copies something I publish, they can’t prove it was me unless I choose to cryptographically sign it - the trouble with blockchain solutions is everything is signed by default and its hard to keep an alt account anonymous.

More pressing than link rot tho, as you point out, is network spam, how to stay sane on a web that’s 90% bots posting markov-generated content. I’m interested in maintaining collections of data and their original context, so if someone shares a 5 second clip its trivial for me to pull up the file it was clipped from. This kind of searchability and back-linking is what I’m turning to xanadu for.

[ I appreciate the opportunity to think “out loud” :) ]

"I'll admit to being extremely annoyed by web3 (due to javascript massively disempowering users, taking away things we used to be able to do)"

JS is a web 2 thing though.

Agreed, and web3 isn't getting any better /snark off

Genuinely curious, what has JavaScript taken away that you used to be able to do with the web? (other than use sites with JS turned off :)

I'll bite - this is an incomplete list:

- Save web pages to disk (in an usable form, i.e. usable by scripts etc., offline)

- curl + script to handle content - now you need puppeteer etc.

- Easy automation of web pages (same as above) - can't just do POST (yes some pages have APIs. Most are different and require effort)

- Custom CSS that works universally

- Do powerful stuff with proxies (i.e. rewrite requests, responses)

- Link to individual documents or even anchors by default

- Pages are the same for everyone, you can send people a link and expect they see it, and see it the way you do

... the list goes on, but these cover some of the most important points.

You can still do all of these things. JavaScript isn’t the problem.

Your issue is more that there’s no longer any standardization of the web and the surface area to which sites are designed have increased drastically.

One could still make a site today that can do everything you’re describing

I invite you to try and do any of these things and discover how hard, prohibitively hard they are.

It’s not - a plain text site example, does all of these automatically

Sorry, you're right of course. But anything like a SPA where javascript populates and/or changes the DOM - that's not accessible to a plain client without rendering engine.

Sure, but the issue isn’t JavaScript, the issue is that people are building their websites as web apps and when it isn’t necessary.

Java applets and flash had the same issues.

Printing web pages. Those days is either print screen and paste in an image editor or copy text and paste it in a text editor.

> the focus was on making information accessible and editable using automation. There. That's the magic. Let's bring that back instead of a mere aesthetic.

Maybe what I'm aiming to do with stealth aligns with your goals? [1] I'm trying to use the best parts of the web3 idea (decentralization, distribution, sharing of storage + bandwidth) and combine it with the ideas of the old web, where the focus was on distributing information and not on advertisement or social influence.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

> I'm trying to use the best parts of the web3 idea (decentralization, distribution) and combine it with the ideas of the old web

Weren't decentralization & distribution already part of the “old web” idea too?

Decentralization: Yes, but Distribution: No.

I was more talking about what's possible when your Browser can share resources with other Browsers in your local network, e.g. saving redundant downloads when one of your peers already downloaded the very same URL ... or long-term caching everything by default, and making the URLs and their content offline-readable when you have no internet connection.

Gopher isn't/wasn't part of the web. It was an alternative and it failed in part due to licensing.

>But, I don't buy the gemini thing at all. Come on, gopher? That's not at all what the web was about.

It's what I want it to be about, for one.

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