It is time to build a new internet
mrmarket.bearblog.dev
mrmarket.bearblog.dev
More than making the new stack non-interoperable with existing tech, you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money. And then you're talking an even bigger revolution than a new internet.
There's a kernel of interesting ideas here, but I don't think it pays due enough attention to the rotting of the internet being a socioeconomic problem (feature?) first.
Why? Just eliminate surveillance.. no tracking is no money. There's another theory that maybe no money is no content, but that's sort of what tfa (and other stuff on HN lately) is actually talking about. Lots of people who would make content or just conversation for free are still relying on some sense of community which is under attack everywhere if not already destroyed. Community means organic discovery, organic participation, and some reasonable expectation of continuity / non-enshittification that's actually independent of corporate interests or sponsorship.
Seems easy in the way that a lot of things are easy, and this definitely isn't about making everyone and everything untraceable.
We don't really need to play ads at 15% extra volume from content. GDPR didn't mean that every website has to do the passive-aggressive "Just following the rules here, click this so I will leave you alone" popup. Facebook could track users and sell ads without eagerly getting involved in things like election interference. Gas stations and airplanes could enjoy the good thing they've got going without pushing ads at captive audiences, increasing their margins some tiny percent of a percent while increasing friction and misery a lot more than that. A lot of this stuff is like arson, or stealing clothes that don't fit.. often the bad guy barely profits so it just seems pretty self-destructive and crazy.
I'm no idealist and I take for granted that greed and evil is going to happen, but I think most people can see that we need to pump the brakes. No-limits enshittification just blows up everything in the long term, including profit margins. Why the board and shareholders always tolerate this stuff from the person temporarily in the executive office is mystifying.
Gas stations, not sure, but someone the other day here suggested that airlines would be operating at a loss if they didn't have financializstion gimmicks like that.
Also, this current system selects for profitability. You don't have to financialize everything, but if you don't and your competitor does and therefore has more capital than you, then, eventually your competitor will eat you, either through a buyout, price starving you, or buying more politicians than you and regulating or lawfaring you to death.
This is an absolutely hard rule of capitalism, baked into the very premise of it.
I think we should make it so profit generating algorithms (corporations) can't behave this way - regulation seems a short term solution since capital == power so eventually corporations will just unregulate by buying politicians.
That’s a lot easier said than done.
It's not a technical problem, but a societal one. We stopped pushing out sellouts, because we knew that life was unaffordable and we wanted people we admire to be able to afford it.
10 years passed, and people on youtube become a part of stock portfolios.
So we have to solve that issue – either we want people rewarded monetarily, and it all will go to shit optimized for monetization, or we don't, and we will sometimes have to see people we like and admire struggle with poverty.
This isn’t the answer though. It’s not technically feasible and doesn’t actually address the problem.
Your falling into the classic software brain trap of thinking the solution to a social problem is a technical one, when that isn’t necessarily the case.
You cannot solve social problems using technical solutions.
Someone would simply build a bridge and siphon data out or in. Interoperability is one of those low-hanging fruits that, once solved, ruins its value.
Like you would say who you think is credible and human. An algorithm would evaluate trust on your behalf and it would look to the people you trust, and then who they trust, and so on and assign scores to people. Distrust, or even other observations, could percolate in a similar way.
Then on social networks, or some sort of small-web, new users would need to find other people to vouch for them to establish trust. When viewing websites or social media posts the trust score of users could be shown alongside content, and used to filter feeds / visibility. A troll or bot could rather rapidly get picked up by a network of distrust so they could be filtered out quickly.
The algorithms and details of such a thing are fuzzy to me, and I think a lot of care and thought would be needed to try to ensure it doesn't collapse under subtle flaws with time.
1. Most websites that aren't dead had huge influx of new users at some point of their history. Recommendation system cannot handle that - it becomes a bottleneck, and people move to a competitor that doesn't have this problem.
2. Suppose you have a community and you say that each new user needs to be at least 99% compatible with what the community already stands for. Congratulations, your community will decay exponentially with each new user bringing the quality down just a tiny bit until it's gone.
The solutions that actually work tend to be UI-oriented. For example, 4chan has an outdated interface not because admins don't know to do modern UI, but rather because outdated UI filters off normies.
The biggest challenge is the balance between new users, who tend to bring the quality down, and old users, who are boring and have nothing to say beyond what has already been said.
I'm actually building this
100 different, easy to integrate internets federated across a number of different communication technologies and protocols is actually very hard to regulate and capture.
Sure, you won't have another Facebook, but we children of the 70s, 80s,and 90s would ser value in that.
When I was a novice programmer, we used to move packets between DECnet, IP and X.500 networks all the time.
When I didn't know much about computers, networks were federated by default.
The thing is, time went by and we realized that IP was just better than all the others, and everybody started using it for everything.
And if you're making the claim that the root of problems like walled gardens and enshittification is the internet protocol ... get outa here.
There is also gopher and USENET, but on cells it can be hard.
But the largest issue is the users attraction to "bright and shiny". I think no matter what comes I fear it will end up on the same path as now. Gemini has the ability to avoid enshitification, but it is still not attracting users like www.
Anyway alternatives exist but they need some TLC and a method to keep out commercial entities.
What is "TLC" meaning here? Furthermore, for the purpose of keeping out commercial entities, it would be necessary to have the details of what is intended to be avoided and in what contexts, as well as how to avoid certain things; I think simply "keeping out commercial entities" won't do (except perhaps for such things like e.g. indexing services, which can choose not to link to them).
Perhaps a HTTP browser that only `Accept`s `text/markdown` might be interesting but replacing IP is right out for me to participate in, at least.
If nobody else knows then they might not access, but I looked; at least some of the parts looks like interesting to me.
> The protocols in use here are quite nice and there's always Gemini if you want a protocol that is pure document oriented.
As well as others, depending on what you want to do; it is not quite as simple as "pure document oriented" (e.g. Gemini does have inputs (1x status code) and TLS as well, including authentication with client certificates).
> Perhaps a HTTP browser that only `Accept`s `text/markdown`
It might also be made to be modular so that the file formats and other features can be added separately (including HTTP, HTML, Unicode, etc also would not be forcibly built-in, and the different protocols, file formats, character sets, and other features can be done by adding them on (which can be static or dynamic; static might allow some possible optimizations but would require recompiling and/or relinking it when you want to change it)).
Since you have nerd sniped me, I will take a riff at what the principles should be (feel free to disagree):
1. The internet should be centered on devices we own. It runs on our devices, data is stored on our devices. For god’s sake, you can get a 20TB drive now for $500.
2. The internet should be local-first too. The normal order of operations should mean that things are local such that they work offline too by default.
3. The internet should be private. What we view shouldn’t be trackable. I think some of this falls out of 1 and 2, but something something like Tor for the rest.
I think this aligns with the principles of local-first software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ largely, with a twist of content addressed storage for bulk static content exchange (so more Git than CRDTs).
Sounds like an XY problem. What op wants is high barrier of entry and high curation. That exists already, but by virtue of high barrier of entry, they are hard to find :p. Discords, matrix, webrings, weird little websites.
How can a non cool clueless child of the 80's join these secret clubs?
Local first down to the city/regional datacenter not the home. Datacenter serving and providing service to its region at a low cost and it should hold its user data and avoid sharing with other servers as much as possible.
When you buy an internet plan it should come with a domain either a custom or a city/region.country. The internet plan should come with an email, internet wallet, reasonable amount of cloud storage, web server. If the user wants to replace any of these with their own self hosted service thats fine.
Two seperate webs. Clear web, transparent at a government level, absolutely no anonymity, everyone uses their full name, their full ID and can get arrested for saying and doing unhinged illegal things. You setup your personal AI to troll on reddit, warning from the police. You stalk and harrass people, vist from the police. you talk about firebombing a walmart, police vist. Friend/block list implemented so you can restrict certain people from viewing your content and your homepage block list should also allow you to block friends of a friend as well as allow friends of a friend etc. Browser settings can be more open by default. All bot traffic registers with their government.
Dark web, restricted access to only people over 18, people cannot be held legally liable for anything said or actions done(they should be able to say "thats not me" and there be no way to disprove, probably gonna be an absolute cess pit but im actually optimistic people would make some cool spaces and it'd foster its own unique culture with gatekeeping and natural webs of trust. Full anonymity privacy, can roll new digital wallets, can roll new auth keys, browsers very locked down and sandboxed, the regional data centers would run nodes to provide speed and resiliency to the network.
I dont know how many people would want this. Probably hearing it everyone hates it and recoils but I reckon after 10 years when people's brains have healed they would say its best than the current internet.
That being said, the fact that the obvious attack vector goes completely unaddressed gives me pause.
It would be better if it acted like a vouch tree so you could create a web of trust but there's no enforcement mechanism so I don't even know how that would work.
Seems to me like OP is trying to work around dns
Edit: found it, it was TARPN https://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20260522023015/https://mrmarket....
Basically, it’s a system that works at a scale where individuals can hold one another accountable. But not really beyond the Dunbar number, and certainly not at internet scale.
To become a full member of the WoT, you need five valid signatures from existing members, and be at a distance of <=5 signature hops away from 80% of the network. Signatures expire, and there's limits on issuing signatures. (There's a few more rules to it)
Wait, is this person a ghostwriter? A slopmonger?
LinkedIn as a good-faith networking site is trashed
Yeah, how did that happen?
To escape everything that makes the internet garbage now, I've come to the conclusion we need gated digital communities kept free of anything other than donation-based monetisation.
What ruined the internet was, quite frankly, non-nerdy people who caused the average intelligence of the internet to massively drop causing everything to be catered to LCD rather than assuming a basic competency.
Yes, everything needing to extract money is part of it but that wouldn't be as offensive if there was still alignment on demographics of the internet; nerds, geeks, and various outcasts.
The solution to this is community and admin self-policing. HN has accomplished this by having community buy-in that we aren't Reddit so any Reddit-esque jokes or low quality replies quite immediately get removed causing the behavior to get trained out of newbs.
While this was in a time when PCs where the main and only thing for most to access the internet, in my opinion this problem really took shape as smartphones got popular. They where shaped to adapt to a low-level of tech literacy, and lock you in instead of actually providing knowledge to the user. Facebook then went in, and then Whatsapp. Whatsapp was a fun one because carriers made it free of charge, the push to the masses was insane, and nowadays you are questioned and looked at weird if you say you don't have a Whatsapp account.
That trend is what broke most of the social interactions and services on the internet for me.
I also feel like if you're going to invent a new internet from first principles, how are you going to not end up with the current one? (or a shitty version of it)
The answer might be an invite tree as the article suggests. They might be hoping for too much user quality from the invite tree, or at least hoping for a level of user quality that would only work at a small scale. Rather than "zany founders, reclusive poets, eccentric engineers of all kinds, high school teachers, homegrown philosophers, garage tinkerers, and beloved drug-addled futurist artists", imo to include a lot of people a simple invite tree would get you "not a literal bot". Trying to actually evaluate user quality gets you into moderation, federation, it is not easy. You could keep it small, but that's not an Internet replacement, that's a private forum, which as the author says they already have.
Imo a good start would be the much narrow problem of identifying your device as not a bot when browsing. Something like google fraud defense https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362 except instead of a google owning your identity, some sort of user tree where you can vouch anonymously for people you know, and ban users and users who added them for scraping.
For the record: I know starting from scratch and creating a new way for machines to transfer information is nearly impossible and certainly redundant/not worth the squeeze. But everyone is right to call that out, lol. I was feeling frustrated by the pervasiveness of AI slop and just fired this one off. It was the equivalent of vowing to go completely off grid after seeing one too many ads in a doctor's office. I was basically fantasizing about buying time before those with a profit motive showed up. Of course, we will always run into the same problem whenever a commons materializes. It's our nature, after all.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestions I did get, though. And appreciated the vast majority of the discourse here.
In the interest of transparency: I deleted the stuff about stripping the internet to the studs, lol. But I will own that I suggested it. It's just perhaps a distraction to my true point, which was that the beautiful internet experiment is in a state of vast humiliation.
I actually designed a device about 10 years ago, it was connection like Tailscale but embedding a 32 bit IPV4 experience in the IPV6 space. You still had to pay $1/month or so to cover the cost or running a network specific DNS somewhere but you already pay for your own Internet access, and putting a "server" in the form of a RaspberryPi on this network would be super oldschool. Think Metro-scale 'NAT' where the 'NAT' part was just the lower 32 bits of a 96 bit prefix. You can lift and run, unchanged, the IPV4 world if you want. Your own private 4 billion address space to play around in.
(Besides just the laziness of people not bothering to press shift (like not using punctuation).)
The network is vast, but only some nodes are valuable.
If we didn't have a strategy for X in the first place did we build the right thing? Should we go build another same-shaped thing also with no strategy for X?
Ah, but protocols and all of the good stuff from humanity, etc. Come on...
The internet is still there. Just go find it. Just go spend your time, money, and attention on it instead of where you are spending it now.
You won't do that, though. Will you?
People...
Which immediately raises the question of what constituents bad faith interaction?
I think the author is at least saying that content created for the express purpose of pushing products is a bad faith interaction they don't want to engage with, cool, I'm not exactly a fan of ads myself
So what are different kinds of ecosystem that are resistant to bad faith interactions and why?
Academia is one to a degree, that's one kind of space where doing this kind of bad faith interaction would receive pushback, so it becomes not worth doing, that's one kind of negative feedback cycle, I think to a degree HN has a similar dynamic of the censor backed with moderation, the cost here would be the space constantly working to keep itself "pure"
My understanding is 4chan and it's like are another, their strategy is to create such a hostile environment that capital has limited interest in engaging with it, all you get are "authentic" interactions, though I'm not going to pretend I've spent much of any real time on there, so this is at best based on second hand experience, the cost here is more interesting, how hostile an environment are the users willing to bare and perpetuate in order to create their safe haven?
Then there's non-standard technical spaces, I'm less confident than the author that you can create a real alternative web without paying a tax on some level, what I mean by that is if you're building a protocol, it has on some level to be hostile or it's going to get co-opted, what comes to mind is something more like a multimodal protocol, you don't send text, you send media the vast majority of the time, VNC for example might work, your clients register click and hover states in 2d space and your servers are basically game engines, it would be very technically hostile, however until AI tools get a lot better, there's really little for them to work with and taking and remixing content is now fully on the authors terms, the downside is this might be worse, because it is very limiting and completely against the principles of what the web was built on, so if capital ever decides that they value this new space there's a lot they can do here
Am alternative tax is going fully into the p2p world, we build a network based on caching and p2p sharing and tracking anonymous metrics of how much content has spread, or who in the network has S it, that would at least indicate if it's something widespread or if it's something people who you trust engage with, this will make a network of gaps, where the cost is potentially even more fragmentation, however you can at least trust that some people who you know are on some level vouching for the content you see
It's a hard problem, I'm interested if this reframing on costs gives people a better way to think about it?
But there's lots of good stuff on the Internet that isn't the web or web-adjacent.
We already had that, it was called crypto mining. Profit motive has taken care of that already
People use block a lot there, not being rude, but just to curate their own feed so that it only has the stuff they want to see. There's a lot of left-wing and "woke" content, but that's a preference. If you don't lean that way, just start blocking and following to get the feed you want.
There's no algorithm, or any way to impose one, and no central control. It's a lightly modified ActivityPub protocol so you can always make your own client and server setup if you want.
I haven't seen any proper commercial spam yet, and the few MLM posts I've instantly blocked (I suspect hacked accounts). Since you only see who you follow, there's no way for a commercial account to get any reach - you'd have to pay someone with a lot of followers to boost your post to get it anywhere.
I'm really enjoying it.
It felt awesome because what we had before were books and TV.
We can’t recreate the feeling we had back then, because it was caused by a drastically new experience.
Suddenly I could chat with people on the other side of the planet that I had never met before. Suddenly I had access to an inifinite amount of content without having to browse a physical library or wait for the right radio program to air.
It was a liberation.
But the truth is that content quality was generally low, and it was difficult to search.
There was no wikipedia, no hacker news, most websites were full of ad banners, pyramid schemes, half baked content, keywords designed to optimize SEO. You’d spend literally hours clicking through web rings, just to realize none of the websites in the ring were good.
Connection was slow as fuck, and expensive. Downloading a good quality photo could take 5-10 minutes. And these were minutes you would pay for the price of a phone call.
It was extremely impractical.
The internet has since been through many phases. There was maybe a piracy phase, with Napster and CD burners. Then the start of Google was quite something. The start of facebook was exciting to a lot of people (I am proud to have never joined), and so were the beginnings of Twitter. Now it’s clearly all about video content.
But it’s never stopped being the internet. Every time something new arises, like Second Life, or Youtube, or Discord, it feels fresh again, and then we see the cracks, we feel the pressure or monetization.
My point is that the feeling that OP is after is that feeling of freshness, of optimism, of experiencing something different. People like that don’t realize that what they’re after is not an end goal, it’s a journey.
Even without enshittification, a mature network is never going to keep the dynamics of its early days. Many people criticize HN, Wikipedia, Youtube for not being what they used to be. Even though the content is still there and still good.
It is true to a certain extent that succesfull networks eventually attract bad actors, but imo boredom is the most important factor in the decline of these systems.
That, and billionare investor Russ Hanneman standing in front of his orange McLaren waiting for his daughter to be released from the grade school he forgot she no longer attended screaming about his willingness to pay for gay sex.
No TCP/IP means no normal internet routing. → You would need a totally new way for machines to find and send data to each other.
Bots are not tied to HTTP/HTML forever, people can write new bots for the new protocol, including by the use of GUI automation (digital or with plotters that mimic human actions (instagam farm bots))
Can you please not do this in comments? It is very demoralizing to post something and be met with this kind of reaction, which will hit the other person 100x harder than I'm sure you intended. You can make your substantive points without that.
Anyway, let this be a lesson to me. Next time I post to HN, I should count to 10 and look at my rant with more rational eyes. No harm done.
I've been thinking of building out a network of nodes in Taipei. Chatting with people this weekend at g0v summit about it. There's many reasons in Taiwan we could use an internet that's not the internet. If not today, then tomorrow...
If everyone could register their publicKey:IPv6 pair then why would we go to FB at all if we could talk directly with each other?
Yes there's technical challenges, but the current iteration of the clearnet is on life support from a humanistic perspective.
And, projects of similar conceptual scope already been accomplished. There exists more than one application layer network built on top of the current Internet.
If you want to criticize the idea I encourage you to; but please don't just shoot down and insult on hn.
They just did. That isn't "just" shooting down.