Comment by panphora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panphora | Hacker News Reader

This is my dream to. It goes something like this:

- Find any cool tool online, download it, use it locally. Your data is persisted to your own local machine and your own personal cloud.

- Visit any website, download it as your own, modify it. Host it as your own and continue to add to it online.

- Browser vendors implement user accounts & hosting into the browser, so anyone can make a working app locally with a little bit of HTML and serve it to the whole internet with the press of a button.

- If your app takes off and goes viral, part of the economic value provided flows back to you through micropayments.

Basically: portable HTML "objects" that can be treated as mutable apps instead of only static documents = like GitHub + Codepen + Vercel + NoCode in one neat little package.

The first two points are foundational design principles for Decker[1], a programming environment which can be used as a local application or as a single-file self-contained web page which still retains all the development tools. The same is true for TiddlyWiki[2].

The web ecosystem already provides the substrate necessary to realize these visions, it's a matter of building things with a particular perspective in mind; a rejection of centralized infrastructure which is in many cases simply not needed.

1) http://beyondloom.com/decker/

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki

That doesn't seem all that different from netscape and how it included a wysiwyg editor.

Obviously this is much harder given how much more server side the modern internet is. But i think the more fundamental problem is that 99% of users dudn't want this in the past and still dont really want this.

Micropayments is still not a thing yet. I think that if it were it would give rise to a lot of interesting movements like this one, organically more or less. The problem with open source and giving away things free is that people just take without giving back.

Really like that. Just add easy versioning and some tags and we're good to go.

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