The plain-text internet is coming | Hacker News Reader

The plain-text internet is coming

protocol.com

52 pointspokolovsky33 comments

> He said that because the site is so simple and low-bandwidth, his Amazon CDN bill is only about $50 a month, and it’s mostly a fun side project anyway. Its success may change that, though: After recently hitting the front page of Hacker News and being featured on Daring Fireball, he said the site’s traffic went up 100x overnight, to about 100,000 homepage loads a day. (Those are all the analytics he has, because, again, simplicity.) Since then it’s dropped, but it’s still 10x what it was a few weeks ago. At some point, he might have to put an ad on the site. But it’d probably be plain text.

Is this another case of "this would cost <$5 on a dedicated box or non-cloud VPS, and you wouldn't even notice the load from spikes"? It's a pre-rendered text page (20KB as fully self-contained HTML archive) being served at all of 1 pageview per second. It does not cost $600/year to run such a thing in 2022.

The extra $595 a year is paying someone else to run the infrastructure and security updates.

Well, then go shared hosting, even cheaper, and they manage the infrastructure.

When I pay Hetzner for an instance, what security infrastructure updates am I missing that is worth $595 a year? When I update the Linux OS and download the security patches, what am I missing compared to the AWS AMI of that very same Linux OS applying the same security patches? If I run a Debian AMI, is there a special supersekrit actually-secure Debian OS that Amazon gets but I don't?

Amazon updates their severs on your behalf. If I had a digital ocean droplet it would be up to me to update the OS and maybe Apache or whatever else would serve my text only site.

I’ve seen someone miss a Wordpress vuln on a Friday and was hacked by Saturday. Not saying all hosting companies react quickly but they at least have teams of people watching stuff. Peace of mind is a valuable thing if you have other areas to focus on like school or work and family.

> Amazon updates their severs on your behalf.

No, they don't, unless I am very misinformed about how Amazon VM images work. If I fire up a Debian AMI, it'll update itself, or not. (How would Amazon 'update it on my behalf'? What if it needs a reboot?)

The original article is taking about using Amazon CDN not a VM. When you use this hosting type style you are paying someone else to manage the underlying servers. Same with the people who use S3 or Wordpress or whatever namecheap/godaddy provides for static sites. That’s one of the reasons a VM can be $5 vs a CDN at $50 a month.

The round trip time between distant users to your VPS would be quite large though.

For plain-text internet, I'm skeptical RTT matters all that much.

You can get a dedicated box for <$5? I would really appreciate any recommendations.

No, you can’t. Maybe a dedicated Raspberry Pi from one of the services that rents those out?

https://tnahosting.net/

y'welcome. $25/year = $2.10/mo

That’s not dedicated.

Scrolled past the giant gif, got their newsletter popup, instantly closed the tab. Indeed the plain-text internet can't get here soon enough.

I created https://legiblenews.com for news because the internet is full of so much junk and tries to be “real-time” or “breaking” when it’s not necessary.

In an effort to make this a sustainable, I charge a $9.99 subscription per year (2.7 cents per day) for premium features to pay the hosting bills. I don’t expect to make a fortune from it, but I am hoping to bring in enough revenue to take this idea further and scale it up to more content.

I think more things like the Gemini Protocol will continue to be popular.

An internet that is deliberately severely bandwidth limited could make navigating between sites much faster. For example, a limit of 100K or even 1K per page for content, or something similar for web assembly applications/modules.

Possibly combine that with entirely ditching JavaScript for web assembly and entirely separating applications from content handled with markdown.

Also going 100% content-centric could be a revolution. Things like IPFS, or maybe build a sandboxed UDP or libp2p API into web assembly.

We called this the WWW back in the day using Gopher and then web browsers with HTML ;)

Tags introduced in HTML 1.0: <TITLE>, <NEXTID>, Base Address, <A>, <ISINDEX>, <PLAINTEXT>, <LISTING>, <P>, <H1>..., <ADDRESS>, <HP1>..., <DL> (with <DT> and <DD>), <UL> (with <LI>), <MENU> and <DIR>.

Gemtext 1.0(?) markup: headlines (three levels), list items, pre-formatted text, quotes, links.

Not sure what you mean with 100% content-centric. No ads? Brutalist Websites?

Wow I will have to look up some of those.

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

> I think more things like the Gemini Protocol will continue to be popular.

Saying "continue" would mean that it is popular now, outside of a very small handful of niche sites I'd say gemini is not popular. I follow this space a bit and I basically only know of https://drewdevault.com/ that actually use it.

I was playing with it for awhile. Its not literally one person. But anyway the point was really not about Gemini being popular or not but just that general category would continue to be a thing.

Here is a nice aggregator for gemini

https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/

Low bandwidth internet would also be very useful with mesh networking solutions, which will tend to have bottlenecks at the exit nodes.

noscript/basic (x)html can do wonders. But it is so stable in time, planned obsolescence is very, very hard to do: web scammers (or brain-washed web devs) don't like that with their absurdely huge and grotesquely complex google(blink/geeko) and apple(webkit) based browsers.

I suggest a new meme: byoCSS (i.e. assuming classless html)

Perhaps there is already support for this via extensions.

I wonder if some flag (among a set?) could be placed within a basic classless html (and no js) page to call forth one or a number of user/user-agent controlled stylings.

This is how I imagine browser support for markdown could work. Plain text comes in over the wire and is rendered to taste.

You should check out Gemini[1]. That's basically how it works.

[1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Gemini sets a good example, but what I’m specifically advocating for is an incremental improvement to how we use the existing web. Fixing e.g. [1] (falling back to plaintext) should be trivial, and with that obstacle removed there would be nothing stopping early adopters from publishing in markdown today.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1319262

Perhaps advertise to the browser per se as plaintext, then have an extension look for a magic number or readable flag to indicate specific-markup-type, and translate from there more opportunistically.

Plaintext infrastructure; readable markup; optional (semi-automated?) styling from there.

(Perhaps your higher-up comment already suggests as much.)

I think you can just serve text/markdown and things that don't know the markdown subtype will just display as plaintext because of the text main type while things that do e.g. extension registering the mime type will render it. Would need to test to verify though.

"The Internet" is full of junk because nobody wants to pay for content, so it is paid for by the advertisers who then want their junk fed to the content consumers. Want cleaner Internet? Pay content creators. Problem solved.

The internet i see and use is effin' great, and free for myself. Apart from my isp, tax and any required hardware, I pay for nothing, and thanks to various blockers i see no ads. Perhaps you may be looking in the wrong places, or have set yoir sights too high?

The article describes a plain-text, fast, and user-friendly site (sports new/scores/whatever) and is titled "Plain-text Internet is coming". My point is that the plain-text Internet will NOT be coming while content creators have a need to support themselves with ads. The author himself says "I might add an ad eventually" to support hosting costs. What if the site takes off and becomes a for-profit operation, where do you think the revenue will come from?

This is part of the story, but it's not all of it. Newspapers and paid cable have had ads for as long as I can remember, even for paying subscribers. So do some tiers of paid Hulu. Paid versions of Windows have started to see more intrusive in-OS ads, and we see ad-supported versions of the Kindle put on the market even though the original Kindle had no ads.

I signed up for a popular online magazine just this week and even when I'm logged in, I see ads begging me to subscribe.

Finally, of course, most of the popular services (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google) don't even offer an ability to pay instead of viewing ads, so consumers can't meaningfully express this preference.

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