INMHO, to build something like that people need a solid institute of reputation back, and – and! – they need to remember who sellouts are and how to push them out.
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.
If such a thing ever becomes big enough that money can be made, it will rot, and orders of magnitude faster than the current internet did.
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.
> you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money.
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.
How do you limit the tracking? The site always gets the private data, it can't work without it. Sites farm out ads but they could be done by the site with no way to tell difference between an ad and a puppy pic.
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.
I agree with the principle that the internet has, for lack of a better word, gone to shit.
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 can solve a ton of social problems with technical solutions.
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.
I have wondered if a pseudo-social / pseudo-technical solution of some sort of trust graph could help.
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.
been playing around with similar stuff as well just for fun but I'm not happy with any solution so far :( -- if there is anything you can share I'd love to take a peek :)
This solution has been tried again and again and each time it failed:
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.
There are also the other "small web" protocols (and some other stuff). Either way, it is still the same internet and not a new one, and still uses TCP/IP and DNS (although not HTTP/HTML). (That does not mean that it is not worth anything, though.)
This was my first thought when reading the title. I've spent the last month using chawan browser, which has a Gemini layer. And it's generally just a lot of fun to mix old web 1.0 layers with a new one.
Yes and it is cell phone friendly. I moved my site to gemini a couple of years ago. Maintenance is trivial compared to the WEB.
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.
Gopher and Gemini can both work on many kind of devices; having a monochrome display, or the differences in input (e.g. having numbered lines works OK, especially since both require links to be on a line by itself, unlike HTML), etc, without the author of the document needing to worry about such things like that. In both cases text entry might sometimes be needed so is not ideal but still it is possible.
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).
Bloody hell. All the way down to TCP/IP? Listen, even getting myself fully IPv6 was a freaking adventure. This is dead in the water. I've gone so far as having a Gemini instance at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev which no one has accessed. To be honest, I don't even understand the motivation. The Internet seems fine 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.
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.
> I've gone so far as having a Gemini instance at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev which no one has accessed.
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)).
I instantly thought of Reticulum too. I got into LoRa based stuff last weekend and the thought of sending messages super slowly to random people around the Chicago area has me excited again about the possiblities of a distrubuted network that nobody truely owns. I bet LoRa based projects are going to have tons of problems at scale but right now it's pretty fun.
If you like HN but not Reddit then why not develop a simple blocking whitelist? You’d have to update it for all the good sites, but it would be easier than everyone else changing networks.
Thought provoking, but i dont understand what making an incompatible protocol would do. As soon as you have a machine-processable protocol (kind of a tautology), you can build bridge layers.
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.
My dream internet is not to different from current internet, TCP/IP and stack is mostly the same but i'll let the nerds figure out how to modify to achieve the below. This model mostly works because I trust my government is working in my interest and generally they do whats right by me. We cannot live in a world where the bad behavior runs unchecked over the good behavior and thats the main thing im trying to solve without outright removing the bad because I enjoy being unhinged and crazy on the internet.
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.
Explain to me the risk to you, average internet user....of a competing network you might choose to join. This may not be the right implementation but p2p and mesh networks seem like the only solve to walled gardens and the current landscape.
what obvious attack vector? It's just a list of urls and dates, and the dates don't even really mean anything.
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.
I don't remember the name of the software/protocol, but I once saw a demonstration of something that seemed similar to the Internet using amateur radios communicating with each other. I think they had either email or something functionally similar, but I was told that it didn't use Ethernet or IP at all (if I'm remembering correctly).
Maybe create something decentralized like torrent. Sites will be shared on many locations; popular sites will have many seeds and survive; unpopular one will have few seeds, maybe only 1 by the original creator.
Author here. I got eaten up, lol. But thanks to those who recommended Gemini, this is exactly what I was looking for.
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.
Tends to happen as terms become familiar (Phonograph becomes phonograph, Universe becomes universe, Web site becomes website, …) and lowercase-i internet is now recommended by various style guides.
Hate to sound elitist but the normie-ification of the internet has ruined it. I started using the internet long after the "Eternal September", and even in my lifetime the decline has been stark.
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.
I disagree with the idea that money is what ruined the internet, to a degree.
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.
In the late 2000's/early 2010's that started to pick up where i live, and it was referenced (even by the government itself with it's social programs) as 'digital inclusion', where technology products where subsidized and made more accessible (dumbed down) to the general public, for the reason you mentioned on your third paragraph.
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.
Eh, idk if a totally new internet is either feasible or needed.
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.
Ok, this isn’t the way (replacing TCP/IP is impossible - we can’t even upgrade the VERSION of IP for god’s sake), but I do like the intent.
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).
Came here to say the same thing. It does use TCP/IP but I didn't really understand why "no TCP/IP" is a hard requirement of the original article anyway.
The idea is: we could have / have had some ideal situation but some X comes later and ruins it.
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.
I can't help but feel like these things sort of exist already in imperfect forms, so the question that comes to mind is one of costs, specifically what costs does interacting with or using such a network impose that makes it not worth it for people to engage with it in bad faith
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?
All it takes, though, is for one unscrupulous or lazy individual to join, and then they vouch for a few people they don’t really know, and then you get a bot vouched for, and then a few more, and the first few bots vouch for other bots, and soon they’re all vouching for each other and you’re back to where you started.
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.
Ğ1 (https://duniter.org/) has a strategy that largely solves this. It's a web-of-trust cryptocurrency with some adoption in France that includes a UBI.
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)
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.
It's the most dumb article I have ever seen on Hackernews with respect to the writer who has knowledge about protocols and concepts.
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))
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.
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...
I mean, yeah, if you made a non-interoperable internet2, no one would use that, and therefore no marketer would use that too. In this sense this article is 100% correct.
> It's the most dumb article I have ever seen on Hackernews
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.
Thanks for sticking up for me, lol. It's ok though. He's partly right in that I was in a rash burn-it-all down mood at the time of this post. Suggesting we start from scratch re: create an entirely new way to transfer information between machines was obviously pretty hyperbolic and over the top. I had just seen one too many AI-generated posts on bearblog and wanted to do the equivalent of go off-grid and hope there was some organic beauty to be found there before the parking lots inevitably appeared.
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.
Middle-out compression was indeed the first thing that came to mind when reading the headline.
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.
People need to realize that the Internet in the 90s was not very good in itself.
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.
INMHO, to build something like that people need a solid institute of reputation back, and – and! – they need to remember who sellouts are and how to push them out.
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.
If such a thing ever becomes big enough that money can be made, it will rot, and orders of magnitude faster than the current internet did.
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.
> you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money.
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.
“Just eliminate surveillance”.
That’s a lot easier said than done.
How do you limit the tracking? The site always gets the private data, it can't work without it. Sites farm out ads but they could be done by the site with no way to tell difference between an ad and a puppy pic.
> How do you limit the tracking?
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 and airplanes
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.
I agree with the principle that the internet has, for lack of a better word, gone to shit.
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.
Is it the internet/protocols that’s gone to shit or the watering holes we all hang out at?
> What we basically need is a completely new protocol stack that is not interoperable with TCP/IP.
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.
You can solve a ton of social problems with technical solutions.
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.
cant the boomers just go to nursing already so we can forget them and build our own internet with our own ideas?
the internet isn't "dead" its turning inwards towards private group chats and less public discourse.
Because THIS TIME it'll just take the passing of the older generation for all of societies ills to be solved.
We either design with human nature in mind or accept that things will degrade.
When I was but a youngster, the "internet" part of "internet protocol" was precisely 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.
What you described is the internet. The 'inter-' prefix means that.
I have wondered if a pseudo-social / pseudo-technical solution of some sort of trust graph could help.
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.
>I have wondered if a pseudo-social / pseudo-technical solution of some sort of trust graph could help.
I'm actually building this
been playing around with similar stuff as well just for fun but I'm not happy with any solution so far :( -- if there is anything you can share I'd love to take a peek :)
This solution has been tried again and again and each time it failed:
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.
precisely. the real problem is capitalism and as long as we live under it there will be financial incentive to exploit any infrastructure we build
You should checkout the Gemini Protocol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
And I definitely suggest writing a server or client for it! It is a really fun weekend project.
There are also the other "small web" protocols (and some other stuff). Either way, it is still the same internet and not a new one, and still uses TCP/IP and DNS (although not HTTP/HTML). (That does not mean that it is not worth anything, though.)
This was my first thought when reading the title. I've spent the last month using chawan browser, which has a Gemini layer. And it's generally just a lot of fun to mix old web 1.0 layers with a new one.
Yes and it is cell phone friendly. I moved my site to gemini a couple of years ago. Maintenance is trivial compared to the WEB.
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.
Gopher and Gemini can both work on many kind of devices; having a monochrome display, or the differences in input (e.g. having numbered lines works OK, especially since both require links to be on a line by itself, unlike HTML), etc, without the author of the document needing to worry about such things like that. In both cases text entry might sometimes be needed so is not ideal but still it is possible.
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).
TLC (tender loving care) means a better method to avoid spam. That can be a problem with USENET.
Bloody hell. All the way down to TCP/IP? Listen, even getting myself fully IPv6 was a freaking adventure. This is dead in the water. I've gone so far as having a Gemini instance at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev which no one has accessed. To be honest, I don't even understand the motivation. The Internet seems fine 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.
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.
> I've gone so far as having a Gemini instance at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev which no one has accessed.
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)).
https://reticulum.network/
I instantly thought of Reticulum too. I got into LoRa based stuff last weekend and the thought of sending messages super slowly to random people around the Chicago area has me excited again about the possiblities of a distrubuted network that nobody truely owns. I bet LoRa based projects are going to have tons of problems at scale but right now it's pretty fun.
Dial-up BBS checks all these boxes. Now have at it!
If you like HN but not Reddit then why not develop a simple blocking whitelist? You’d have to update it for all the good sites, but it would be easier than everyone else changing networks.
Thought provoking, but i dont understand what making an incompatible protocol would do. As soon as you have a machine-processable protocol (kind of a tautology), you can build bridge layers.
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.
My dream internet is not to different from current internet, TCP/IP and stack is mostly the same but i'll let the nerds figure out how to modify to achieve the below. This model mostly works because I trust my government is working in my interest and generally they do whats right by me. We cannot live in a world where the bad behavior runs unchecked over the good behavior and thats the main thing im trying to solve without outright removing the bad because I enjoy being unhinged and crazy on the internet.
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.
> There are tiny safe zones, like secret closed invite-only forums
How can a non cool clueless child of the 80's join these secret clubs?
Go make friends on IRC and Matrix and you will get invited to other servers
Explain to me the risk to you, average internet user....of a competing network you might choose to join. This may not be the right implementation but p2p and mesh networks seem like the only solve to walled gardens and the current landscape.
Seems to me like OP is trying to work around dns
The human.json protocol is worth checking out as a proxy for the whole "more human internet" conversation. Not perfect but interesting!
https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json
`human.json` is a neat idea and I’ve been watching it closely. I’m even debating dropping one on my own site.
That being said, the fact that the obvious attack vector goes completely unaddressed gives me pause.
what obvious attack vector? It's just a list of urls and dates, and the dates don't even really mean anything.
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.
I don't remember the name of the software/protocol, but I once saw a demonstration of something that seemed similar to the Internet using amateur radios communicating with each other. I think they had either email or something functionally similar, but I was told that it didn't use Ethernet or IP at all (if I'm remembering correctly).
Edit: found it, it was TARPN https://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html
Maybe create something decentralized like torrent. Sites will be shared on many locations; popular sites will have many seeds and survive; unpopular one will have few seeds, maybe only 1 by the original creator.
Author here. I got eaten up, lol. But thanks to those who recommended Gemini, this is exactly what I was looking for.
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.
Meta: why do people call the Internet "internet" (in English)? It's a proper noun and should be capitalized.
(Besides just the laziness of people not bothering to press shift (like not using punctuation).)
Tends to happen as terms become familiar (Phonograph becomes phonograph, Universe becomes universe, Web site becomes website, …) and lowercase-i internet is now recommended by various style guides.
It feels like you are describing what Matrix is to me now, a federated place where you can hop around but most places are strict about who can enter.
founder content
Wait, is this person a ghostwriter? A slopmonger?
LinkedIn as a good-faith networking site is trashed
Yeah, how did that happen?
when has it ever been a forreal good faith networking site?
Too late for the tech part. The tech stack may be incomprehensible for humans, but LLMs will build on top of it just fine.
Hate to sound elitist but the normie-ification of the internet has ruined it. I started using the internet long after the "Eternal September", and even in my lifetime the decline has been stark.
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.
I disagree with the idea that money is what ruined the internet, to a degree.
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.
In the late 2000's/early 2010's that started to pick up where i live, and it was referenced (even by the government itself with it's social programs) as 'digital inclusion', where technology products where subsidized and made more accessible (dumbed down) to the general public, for the reason you mentioned on your third paragraph.
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.
Eh, idk if a totally new internet is either feasible or needed.
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.
There's a few efforts in this area, and I agree, there is value to be extracted.
'value to be extracted' seems like the exact opposite of the author's sentiment.
Humanistic value, monetary.
which efforts you have in mind?
Ok, this isn’t the way (replacing TCP/IP is impossible - we can’t even upgrade the VERSION of IP for god’s sake), but I do like the intent.
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).
geminispace already exists, though. Just go there.
Came here to say the same thing. It does use TCP/IP but I didn't really understand why "no TCP/IP" is a hard requirement of the original article anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Curation is the cure, but it takes attention from creation. Moderation is power, but the time it takes is a curse.
The network is vast, but only some nodes are valuable.
The idea is: we could have / have had some ideal situation but some X comes later and ruins it.
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...
I can't help but feel like these things sort of exist already in imperfect forms, so the question that comes to mind is one of costs, specifically what costs does interacting with or using such a network impose that makes it not worth it for people to engage with it in bad faith
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?
Some form of gatekeeping, or vouching system seems far more practical to implement.
All it takes, though, is for one unscrupulous or lazy individual to join, and then they vouch for a few people they don’t really know, and then you get a bot vouched for, and then a few more, and the first few bots vouch for other bots, and soon they’re all vouching for each other and you’re back to where you started.
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.
Ğ1 (https://duniter.org/) has a strategy that largely solves this. It's a web-of-trust cryptocurrency with some adoption in France that includes a UBI.
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)
Lobste.rs tracks who vouched for who, and can (and does) ban users at the root of bot farms as well as the entire tree below.
>So one way to keep it from getting enshittified, again is to make the barrier to entry just a touch higher, or add friction.
We already had that, it was called crypto mining. Profit motive has taken care of that already
Mastodon. What you want is already there.
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.
We already tried that with "web3" and as time has shown, it was a complete disaster.
The author is complaining about excess commercialism but Web3 was ultracapitalist from the beginning. These are totally different directions.
It doesn't make sense... like a lot of it. Probably because he is marketer. I get he is upset because things change and that's it.
It's the most dumb article I have ever seen on Hackernews with respect to the writer who has knowledge about protocols and concepts.
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))
The article is a little naive, yea, but it's not even close to the dumbest article I've ever seen on HN :-)
That seems harsh.
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.
> If you want to criticize the idea I encourage you
They just did. That isn't "just" shooting down.
At least he got the premise right, if not the implementation. That is better than 50% of articles. :)
The premise being that the root cause of walled gardens, enshittification, data trading etc. is IP ? Get outa here ...
No that’s the implementation, the premise is that the current internet is not working for us (the people) and we need to move to something that does.
I think we need DNS for all, not just the rich-enough-to-register-a-domain.
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?
Any thoughts on reticulum? https://reticulum.network/
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...
I mean, yeah, if you made a non-interoperable internet2, no one would use that, and therefore no marketer would use that too. In this sense this article is 100% correct.
> It's the most dumb article I have ever seen on Hackernews
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.
Thanks for sticking up for me, lol. It's ok though. He's partly right in that I was in a rash burn-it-all down mood at the time of this post. Suggesting we start from scratch re: create an entirely new way to transfer information between machines was obviously pretty hyperbolic and over the top. I had just seen one too many AI-generated posts on bearblog and wanted to do the equivalent of go off-grid and hope there was some organic beauty to be found there before the parking lots inevitably appeared.
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 will watch tv show <Silicon Valley> again
Middle-out compression was indeed the first thing that came to mind when reading the headline.
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.
yeah i like that guy too.. on top of my head is he hire some guys to find a usb drive which contains bitcoin wallet..
If TFA had been "it's time to build a new World Wide Web", I'd be on board. Most of the web is a dumpster fire and has been for a while.
But there's lots of good stuff on the Internet that isn't the web or web-adjacent.
People need to realize that the Internet in the 90s was not very good in itself.
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.