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Comment by Rohansi | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe this all means there’s a place on the net for gopher, Gemini protocol, or tilde.town or ssh BBSes?

All of those fail #5 for sure. And that's one of the most important points to bring in users IMO.

We all (hopefully) know the world would be a better place with less JS but you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Seems like the whole "no tracking, no targeted advertisements" is a great feature of Gopher & Gemini. BBSes do tracking but it seems rarely used for advertisement its more distributed anyway so if you don't like a BBS you can move to the next one connected to the same messaging networks.

Then there is also the communities, increased accessibility (it's just text) and the more structured nature of the "sites" which may be a feature.

So I would argue that there is definitely some benefits (for the user) to those alternative protocols.

Part of #5, "easy to monetize" leads inevitably to "easy to enshittify". I think this is a point that's not generally well enough understood. If a platform emphasizes monetization, its early adopters will all be grifters and it will provide no benefit to anyone else (cf blockchain).

Gemini and Gopher fail #4 because they aren't application platforms. But I think we probably need to step back and rethink the "deliver sandboxed application that you run automatically" use case. If we really want to still do that, we might want to design something for that purpose from the start. But we might also come to the conclusion that it's fundamentally not a good idea.

I'd presume we're almost all using the Web primarily on some employer's dime (except where we are self-employed but it still applies). Prior to the Web 1.0, I remember interacting with people/managers that discouraged reading email or news or forums or other casual/non-work uses of the Web. I remember articles about employers allowing their programmers to read their email "up to" 2 hours per day. Now we're expected to have rapid response/access to email, slack, SMS, etc.

I believe this is because the commercialization/monetization of Web usage is beneficial to commercial entities. If that isn't possible, then the few who build the Web aren't able to build it in the first place. It's akin OSS and concepts of commercialization in the GPL. You can't create equity if there is no method to transfer value.

#5 is entirely subjective and IMO impossible to fully satisfy as the different sub-clauses conflict.

> “…you can't put the genie back in the bottle.”

Not for nothing, if you’re “building a new internet” you can do whatever you wish.

You fail criterion four: you're limiting what kinds of documents and applications can be developed.

I actually prefer if whatever comes next does not include #5. I'd rather Project Gemini stay the way it is versus every website trying to browse my local storage, troll my localhost sockets, and use any scripting, to be honest. For me, personally, as my own choice, HTML+CSS and no scripting, especially third party scripting, is my kind of WWW replacement.

And this might be unpopular here, but monetizing the 'Net (advertising) is what got us in this Dystopian Digital environment in the first place.

I agree. It's also the evil that created the need and improvements like SSL/TLS, ssh, gzip, bzip2, lz4, Linux, etc. and so many other worthwhile innovations.

"We all (hopefully) know the world would be a better place with less JS but you can't put the genie back in the bottle."

I don't know that.

I suspect you hate javascript because so many ads and tracking software is written with it? Replace JS with something better and the ads will just be written in that.

Otherwise JS .. works and is simple. And compiling any language to wasm very doable nowdays. What would be the alternative?

(Personally I would like to see TS native in the browser)

"works and is simple"? You can argue JS works by definition because it is what people use, but it is far from simple -- JS and C++ are basically the only two programming languages where books plead with you not to use all their features but use a more maintainable subset.

It is simple as in people use succesfully javascript who have no idea what programming is.

Reasons vary per person but personally it's more about bloat. JS as it's used today is very different compared to its initial use case. We build entire applications in JS now, which is cool, but we do this by treating JS as a build target. The code we write is not executed as-is by the browser, it is transpiled and bundled up first. It's way too late to change now but I'd prefer something that embraced application development so that you don't need to pull in React/Vue/whatever and do all of this. Something more opinionated like what we use for native apps, but with the flexibility of HTML+CSS.

I mainly hate JS because when I go on the web I want to view documents with maybe simple forms for interaction and not complex applications. It's not the implementation that's the problem but giving websites compute capability without explicit permission.

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