8 ms·

I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet

115 points by initramfs 4mo ago

mjs06 4mo ago
Agree with many of your points (especially on how Steve jobs would have obsessed on this topic), but how do you think it reaches the masses?
- initramfs 4mo ago
  by train. The internet train. :)
  - mjs06 4mo ago
    I'm waiting at the station. Tell me when you arrive.
  - card_zero 4mo ago
    That would be high bandwidth and high latency, which might be the opposite of what's being proposed in the article. (It's difficult to be certain what's being proposed in the article. I'm fairly sure the article is about internet, beyond that point all is guesswork.)
    - initramfs 4mo ago
      I wrote a number of articles that try to address the many stacks of the application, transport, and OS layers. The best platform I can think of are the mid 2000's Symbian S60 phones, which were Real Time Operating Systems and used J2ME: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-based-phone-apps.html https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba... There are new Java'based platforms that could build upon that, but chips today have so much processing power that they might think it's easier to develop a higher level language with more dependencies. But that leads to more maintenance if some package gets lost or broken. As for the internet speeds themselves, It is similar to net neutrality but a voluntary guideline by the website developers: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sierpinski-triangle-ideal-of.html https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sierpinski-triang... I also explore QUIC, but it's already implemented and not everything needs it, except higher bandwidth: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-dependency-on-web.html https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-d... Once Android and iOS became the leading smartphone makers, code efficiency wasn't super important, because they hardware makers could add 10-20X the RAM. The competition between Symbian and iOS was a brief decade, but it actually made efficient code development interesting and beneficial for battery life. Since RAM got cheaper, even though it's expensive at the high end (HBM3e), it's a lot easier to develop with 4GB of phone memory than 4MB on the Nokia 7650 (2002). Those are quite extremes, but most symbian phones had a lot of features with as little as 32MB of RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650
- milleramp 4mo ago
  Through a series of tubes.
blfr 4mo ago
The coordination and discipline required to build it is quite simply not there (or here, or anywhere). We will sooner have multi-gigabit space internet or 7G.
wmf 4mo ago
I tune out at this "what Steve Jobs would have done" talk. A thing needs to stand on its own without borrowing Steve Jobs (or Jeff Dean as I saw someone do the other day).
- thwgrw 4mo ago
  I mean can't get a more incestous tech cliche! There is a world out there too folks.
  - bigyabai 4mo ago
    The VC Approved™ Software Validation Lifecycle: → What would Steve Jobs do? \ / | | ↓ What would Steve Jobs do? What would Steve Jobs do? ↑ | | / \ What would Steve Jobs do? ←
    - initramfs 4mo ago
      You're listening to WWSJD, the Los Altos FM station where Apple pilgrims tune in to the station that Steve Jobs did!
- initramfs 4mo ago
  I get that, but a lot of design decisions today are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.
  - wmf 4mo ago
    That sounds like a false dichotomy. You want opinionated software? Great, so do I. Design the software, own your decisions yourself, and explain your thinking without shortcuts.
sottol 4mo ago
I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser. I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think: - Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking. - Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos. - Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance. A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.
- initramfs 4mo ago
Animats 4mo ago
Core idea from this: we do need something that discourages web page bloat. The last try at this was Google AMP, which didn't go over well with either site operators or users. Any better ideas?
- dnautics 4mo ago
  gemini gave it the old college try
- t0mas88 4mo ago
  Adblockers. On a lot of sites a significant portion of the bloat is from third party ads and tracking.
- arjie 4mo ago
  To be honest, one thing I've been interested in is a totally markdown-only web. You leave everything the same, you just use a Markweb browser as the only thing and it only accesses text/markdown. Then I build Yet Another Protocol Bridge for my blog and no one visits it ever again. That sounds like fun.
  - Animats 4mo ago
    The trouble is, people keep extending Markdown to add HTML features. There's even Javascript embedded in Markdown.[1] You'd just create churn, not a fix. [1] https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html
    - OkayPhysicist 4mo ago
      There is no "adding HTML features" to Markdown. Markdown is a superset of HTML. You can simply put HTML tags (including script tags) in your Markdown.
      - Animats 4mo ago
        If you interpret Markdown that way, all you've done is encapsulate HTML and JavaScript. Nothing gets simpler.
zokier 4mo ago
I'm struggling to understand what the concrete proposal here is. > So what is Thinnernet? Imagine a fiber optic bundle of undersea cables- maybe a hundred or so 10Gbps cables comprising.... and the question goes unanswered. is it a protocol? physical layer? guideline? no idea.
- initramfs 4mo ago
  It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
  - protocolture 4mo ago
    I still don't get it. I came here to make much the same comment as you are replying to. Unless you mean that your parallel internet is just the regular internet but with the protocols you personally like? So its more of a web thing where you promote sites that aren't bloated? > so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. I don't know that demanding someone like Hurricane Electric to use QoS is going to have a desirable outcome. Is this more a government thing? Forcing T1s to use QoS? My gut tells me that ignoring QoS markers saves them an appreciable amount of CPU, and also lets them act more neutrally. How do I as a carrier service your "Thinnernet". How "Parallel" is the infrastructure? Do I have to buy capacity or can we peer? Do I have to maintain a separate routing table? Do you use BGP or something else? Are you planning to buy L2 international capacity to "Replace" T1's? What do you do if a carrier starts sending everything as EF? Is there a PoC node or network operating anywhere? I just don't see anything in here except for broad references to undersea cables and UX.
analogpixel 4mo ago
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.pngs https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.pngs
- trashb 4mo ago
  That page does not load for me, did you mean https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png or https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - analogpixel 4mo ago
    yup, https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png... Guess I need to update my Alfred Snippet macro for !!standards.
- initramfs 4mo ago
  my challenge for the past 6 years has been trying to prove XKCD's conventional comic panel on that wrong :)
  - analogpixel 4mo ago
    Have you considered making your own comic that every can reference for this... wait.. nevermind.
    - initramfs 4mo ago
      I have made comics before. Maybe I should again.
13415 4mo ago
Personally, I think Reticulum is the parallel Internet. It could even replace the Internet Protocol, and whatever the IP protocol connects is in my view the Internet.
- initramfs 4mo ago
  there's also the network effect to deal with. The Internet is a WAN of WANs. you might have a great parallel Meshtastic network, but if few people are using it, its range might be limited.
numpad0 4mo ago
...may I suggest "Intelligent Software-Defined Network" as an acronym for the sake of giving it one
- initramfs 4mo ago
  I haven't heard of that, but thanks. I have heard of Software Defined Hardware- I guess Networks are a type of hardware (SDH).
  - numpad0 4mo ago
    I mean, a slow, deterministic, latency focused network standards sounds a lot like ISDN and ATM(Asynchronous Transfer Mode) standards... there were such lost competitors to Ethernet, HTTP, HTML, etc.
MrDOS 4mo ago
> There is a funny email that had been released after before Jobs's passing where a user complained of a spotty signal, and his advice was basically to not hold the phone in that direction (or with his hand over the top part where the antenna was positioned). Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]? > because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo. > had Jobs lived to 70 or 80 Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna 1: https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-iphone-4-signal-strength-a-non-issue/ https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...
- initramfs 4mo ago
  Yes, I now realize it was the antennagate story. I included a link to a Slate article that featured an even more unsympathetic writer, which was in 2010, a year before Jobs died. In retrospect, I think Jobs knew his time was limited, and telling a customer not to hold it that way wasn't an unforgiveable sin- in fact, there was some truth to it, even if they didn't have a better modem at the time (my article mentions Qualcomm). And I agree, that yes, hubris is real. I like how Bill Gates told Jobs at the D7 Conference in 2007 that his charisma and spell wouldn't work on him because he was a minor wizard. https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-steve-jobs-was-wizard-who-cast-spells-2019-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-steve-jobs-w... Btw, an in-house modem is something Apple us finally returning to, now that they are ready: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2026/05/16/iphone-18-apple-will-change-key-phone-hardware-after-15-years/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2026/05/16/iphone-1...
bigbuppo 4mo ago
At least it's not the IPv8 guy again.
anenefan 4mo ago
No need to rebuild from ground up, sites just need a low data bandwidth fall back, perhaps with a new html tag indicating user is needing low bandwidth - much like sites used to provide a mobile ready area that was the same page load but simplified somewhat. For the bleakest of disasters, bandwidth would be a premium but a lot can still be done without bandwidth hogging scrip overheads, so site developers just need to include a low bandwidth fall back for the basics - I dare say it might even be lest costly for the LLM scrapers if it were widly adopted. I'd suggest for an idea of basics touring some sites where each page has a small footprint [1] [2] [3] [4] ... I recall days on dialup 3 KB/s - a meg was a wait-a-while. However I don't hold much hope, generally, things only happen out of necessity. [1] https://github.com/bradleytaunt/1kb.club https://github.com/bradleytaunt/1kb.club [2] https://250kb.club/ https://250kb.club/ [3] https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ [4] https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/
- initramfs 4mo ago
  I also contributed to one of those clubs. There's also 10KB club: https://github.com/spxy/10kbclub https://github.com/spxy/10kbclub https://github.com/marcus0x62/tinyblog https://github.com/marcus0x62/tinyblog
- trashb 4mo ago
  there is a whole lot out there. I personally like the following two also: https://nocss.club/ https://nocss.club/ https://no-html.club/index.txt https://no-html.club/index.txt (seems to be offline atm but archive.org has a captured version)
AuthAuth 4mo ago
Its always trying to cut bloat. Cant someone have a vision for a better internet that better caters to modern use cases and utilizes modern tech stacks to deliver the best possible experience? I dont see any value in going back to 100kb web pages
- initramfs 4mo ago
  yes and no. I agree there is some amazing things that can be done with larger websites, but one has to wade through a lot of unoptimal sites to find the good ones.
  - AuthAuth 4mo ago
    Correct me if im wrong, but arent you trying to introduce a space where its impossible for larger websites to exist thus everything is restricted to the bare minimum website features like its 1999. I do not see the point in that, to me the problem isnt a blog with fancy JS vs a blog with static text. Its about corporations exerting outsized amounts of control over how people interact with the web. I want the new web to solve that problem and also be able to serve 4k video.
    - initramfs 4mo ago
      You can already do that. If your home page is a fediverse feed or client, the users provide the content without an algorithm. Many people who have a browser with a Google search bar might think corporations control a lot, but one can set a different browser, DNS, and search engine. The thing Steve Jobs did was simplify the out of the box experience, so when they bought a Mac, there'd only be a dock with Safari at the bottom. One could develop an open source machine with a very unitary goal of accessing a lightweight web using a protocol or extension similar to No script but the average non-technical user might not know how to do that. Of the many Linux distros I've tested, maybe a handful are actually easy to use and not heavy. One example is Bodhi Linux. But I have something more like Tiny Core Linux in mind, except polished (it features a dock, surprisingly). If the hardware could be developed for this too as open hardware, there would be the added advantage of it having more ways to improve it. I'm a bit oxymoronic in having a vertically integrated product idea and an open source bias, but a lot of great ideas need a coherent outline, which sometimes start out as closed source. If the project starts out with enthusiasm but it gets forked, then it becomes impossible to develop one feature that many people didn't realize would be overall a better user experience, or streamlined option, at the very least.
oso2k 4mo ago
I think we could learn from an old (gone?!) Google+ post from Ian Hickson on what could possibly replace HTML but a lot of the criteria applies to Web/Internet as a whole (https://www.sitepoint.com/will-html-ever-be-replaced/ https://www.sitepoint.com/will-html-ever-be-replaced/). Ian Hickson (“Hixie” — WHATWG specification editor, CSS2.1 co-editor and Google’s W3C representative) recently published an interesting post on Google+. He’s occasionally contacted by people suggesting a better alternative to HTML but, in all cases, none have come close. Ian states that any technology would need to satisfy at least five objectives to displace existing web technologies: Be devoid of licensing requirements. Be vendor-neutral and accept input from everyone. Be device and media-neutral; it should work on PCs, TVs, mobiles, tablets, screen readers and any future hardware. Be content-neutral and not restrict itself to types of document or application. Be radically better than the existing web in every way; faster, more usable, more features, easier to develop, easier to monetize, etc. HTML can fail objectives two and three. Technologies such as XHTML2 and XForms only satisfied one and three. Java and Flash struggle in all areas — and I’d also add Google’s Dart to that list. Maybe this all means there’s a place on the net for gopher, Gemini protocol, or tilde.town or ssh BBSes?
- initramfs 4mo ago
  Interesting link! I haven't heard of him, but I didn't have a new protocol in mind per se, since there are many old ones that are still good. But I would have removed the :// from http:// since even Tim Berners-Lee admitted that wasn't needed. I think HTML5 was an improvement from Flash, but there's a lot in the old web, like Xerox Star that had a smooth resolution in the files. Something like LaTeX..
  - rapnie 4mo ago
    I first heard of him via "Towards a Modern Web Stack (Ian 'Hixie' Hickson)" on HN [0]. Quite interesting. Note that the submission link is broken, the google doc link is added below [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit?resourcekey=0-bPajpoo9IBZpG__-uCBE6w https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...
jocelyner 4mo ago
[flagged]
1970-01-01 4mo ago
So Internet2, but with less research? https://internet2.edu/network/ https://internet2.edu/network/
acuozzo 4mo ago
Can you pay for The Thinnernet with Thnickels? https://thick-coins.net https://thick-coins.net
majicDave 4mo ago
I have been working on an alternative to http, and the thinking comes from the same place, thank you for sharing. I still have a way to go, but it's definitely possible, and it is definitely a good idea, I'm very excited about http alternatives in general, we should have many. https://github.com/mjdave/katipo https://github.com/mjdave/katipo
- fhn 4mo ago
  thanks for being MITM
  - majicDave 4mo ago
    Not sure I understand exactly, but I have no desire to host trackers, the idea is that either the client or the host will be hosting their own trackers, or going through some third party trusted tracker hosting service.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      So a tracker is what you called a router. Weird name.
  - initramfs 4mo ago
    Awesome. Starred.
aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
I have the impression that the author does not want to build a parallel internet (which involves whole new protocols replacing, say, IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4, ICMPv6, DNS, perhaps TLS, ...), but rather another application-level protocol replacing HTTP and the web. Remember that the world wide web is just one of insanely many application-level protocols that can be run over the internet infrastructure.
- initramfs 4mo ago
  Correct. The idea is to narrow the application access view from the desktop or home screen of a mobile device to a limited set of optimized apps and protocols that can traverse the web. It's kind of like a dedicated bike lane alongside a boulevard in a major city. One can bike as fast if not faster than cars, but they'd need to adhere to the rules of the bike path.
voidUpdate 4mo ago
I feel like I missed where exactly the parallel part splits. Do they want to make new wires? New fibre protocols? A new TCP/IP stack? Just make another Gopher/Gemini?
- initramfs 4mo ago
  It's more like a virtual network alongside the actual one, with a dedicated bike path separated by a curb and a sidewalk.
tancop 4mo ago
what about going in the other direction? apps instead of sites. wasm for everything, shared immutable libraries, strict capability based security. client side rendering where you can choose between html+css, new binary formats or doing everything from code. easy server overrides so you can redirect all requests from bigtech.com to service.mydomain.net without the app ever knowing. encourage federation and sharing instead of isolation (but thats more of a culture problem new tech cant really solve). put the user back in control.
- spacebacon 4mo ago
  This seems like the natural direction for me.
kangaroozach 4mo ago
https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/
spencerflem 4mo ago
I don’t understand the vision in the blog post, but I’m very excited to try out the Arcan-net as described in http://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/ http://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/
charcircuit 4mo ago
Why not use those extra fiber optic cables as part of the actual internet? You can immediately start making money off of it due to people getting legitimate value from it. If other lines were to be cut or have issues your lines would act as a backup. And yes if things got overloaded it would act slower. It seems unoptimal to make a completely separate network.
OhioMan2943 4mo ago
God hn has so many projects that never go anywhere
ilaksh 4mo ago
https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

115 points by initramfs 4mo ago

mjs06 4mo ago

Agree with many of your points (especially on how Steve jobs would have obsessed on this topic), but how do you think it reaches the masses?

initramfs 4mo ago
by train. The internet train. :)
- mjs06 4mo ago
  I'm waiting at the station. Tell me when you arrive.
- card_zero 4mo ago
  That would be high bandwidth and high latency, which might be the opposite of what's being proposed in the article. (It's difficult to be certain what's being proposed in the article. I'm fairly sure the article is about internet, beyond that point all is guesswork.)
  - initramfs 4mo ago
    I wrote a number of articles that try to address the many stacks of the application, transport, and OS layers. The best platform I can think of are the mid 2000's Symbian S60 phones, which were Real Time Operating Systems and used J2ME: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-based-phone-apps.html https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba... There are new Java'based platforms that could build upon that, but chips today have so much processing power that they might think it's easier to develop a higher level language with more dependencies. But that leads to more maintenance if some package gets lost or broken. As for the internet speeds themselves, It is similar to net neutrality but a voluntary guideline by the website developers: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sierpinski-triangle-ideal-of.html https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sierpinski-triang... I also explore QUIC, but it's already implemented and not everything needs it, except higher bandwidth: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-dependency-on-web.html https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-d... Once Android and iOS became the leading smartphone makers, code efficiency wasn't super important, because they hardware makers could add 10-20X the RAM. The competition between Symbian and iOS was a brief decade, but it actually made efficient code development interesting and beneficial for battery life. Since RAM got cheaper, even though it's expensive at the high end (HBM3e), it's a lot easier to develop with 4GB of phone memory than 4MB on the Nokia 7650 (2002). Those are quite extremes, but most symbian phones had a lot of features with as little as 32MB of RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650
milleramp 4mo ago
Through a series of tubes.

blfr 4mo ago

The coordination and discipline required to build it is quite simply not there (or here, or anywhere). We will sooner have multi-gigabit space internet or 7G.

wmf 4mo ago

I tune out at this "what Steve Jobs would have done" talk. A thing needs to stand on its own without borrowing Steve Jobs (or Jeff Dean as I saw someone do the other day).

thwgrw 4mo ago
I mean can't get a more incestous tech cliche! There is a world out there too folks.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  The VC Approved™ Software Validation Lifecycle: → What would Steve Jobs do? \ / | | ↓ What would Steve Jobs do? What would Steve Jobs do? ↑ | | / \ What would Steve Jobs do? ←
  - initramfs 4mo ago
    You're listening to WWSJD, the Los Altos FM station where Apple pilgrims tune in to the station that Steve Jobs did!
initramfs 4mo ago
I get that, but a lot of design decisions today are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.
- wmf 4mo ago
  That sounds like a false dichotomy. You want opinionated software? Great, so do I. Design the software, own your decisions yourself, and explain your thinking without shortcuts.

sottol 4mo ago

I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser. I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think: - Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking. - Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos. - Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance. A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.

initramfs 4mo ago

Animats 4mo ago

Core idea from this: we do need something that discourages web page bloat. The last try at this was Google AMP, which didn't go over well with either site operators or users. Any better ideas?

dnautics 4mo ago
gemini gave it the old college try
t0mas88 4mo ago
Adblockers. On a lot of sites a significant portion of the bloat is from third party ads and tracking.
arjie 4mo ago
To be honest, one thing I've been interested in is a totally markdown-only web. You leave everything the same, you just use a Markweb browser as the only thing and it only accesses text/markdown. Then I build Yet Another Protocol Bridge for my blog and no one visits it ever again. That sounds like fun.
- Animats 4mo ago
  The trouble is, people keep extending Markdown to add HTML features. There's even Javascript embedded in Markdown.[1] You'd just create churn, not a fix. [1] https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html
  - OkayPhysicist 4mo ago
    There is no "adding HTML features" to Markdown. Markdown is a superset of HTML. You can simply put HTML tags (including script tags) in your Markdown.
    - Animats 4mo ago
      If you interpret Markdown that way, all you've done is encapsulate HTML and JavaScript. Nothing gets simpler.

zokier 4mo ago

I'm struggling to understand what the concrete proposal here is. > So what is Thinnernet? Imagine a fiber optic bundle of undersea cables- maybe a hundred or so 10Gbps cables comprising.... and the question goes unanswered. is it a protocol? physical layer? guideline? no idea.

initramfs 4mo ago
It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
- protocolture 4mo ago
  I still don't get it. I came here to make much the same comment as you are replying to. Unless you mean that your parallel internet is just the regular internet but with the protocols you personally like? So its more of a web thing where you promote sites that aren't bloated? > so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. I don't know that demanding someone like Hurricane Electric to use QoS is going to have a desirable outcome. Is this more a government thing? Forcing T1s to use QoS? My gut tells me that ignoring QoS markers saves them an appreciable amount of CPU, and also lets them act more neutrally. How do I as a carrier service your "Thinnernet". How "Parallel" is the infrastructure? Do I have to buy capacity or can we peer? Do I have to maintain a separate routing table? Do you use BGP or something else? Are you planning to buy L2 international capacity to "Replace" T1's? What do you do if a carrier starts sending everything as EF? Is there a PoC node or network operating anywhere? I just don't see anything in here except for broad references to undersea cables and UX.

analogpixel 4mo ago

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.pngs https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.pngs

trashb 4mo ago
That page does not load for me, did you mean https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png or https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- analogpixel 4mo ago
  yup, https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png... Guess I need to update my Alfred Snippet macro for !!standards.
initramfs 4mo ago
my challenge for the past 6 years has been trying to prove XKCD's conventional comic panel on that wrong :)
- analogpixel 4mo ago
  Have you considered making your own comic that every can reference for this... wait.. nevermind.
  - initramfs 4mo ago
    I have made comics before. Maybe I should again.

13415 4mo ago

Personally, I think Reticulum is the parallel Internet. It could even replace the Internet Protocol, and whatever the IP protocol connects is in my view the Internet.

initramfs 4mo ago
there's also the network effect to deal with. The Internet is a WAN of WANs. you might have a great parallel Meshtastic network, but if few people are using it, its range might be limited.

numpad0 4mo ago

...may I suggest "Intelligent Software-Defined Network" as an acronym for the sake of giving it one

initramfs 4mo ago
I haven't heard of that, but thanks. I have heard of Software Defined Hardware- I guess Networks are a type of hardware (SDH).
- numpad0 4mo ago
  I mean, a slow, deterministic, latency focused network standards sounds a lot like ISDN and ATM(Asynchronous Transfer Mode) standards... there were such lost competitors to Ethernet, HTTP, HTML, etc.

MrDOS 4mo ago

> There is a funny email that had been released after before Jobs's passing where a user complained of a spotty signal, and his advice was basically to not hold the phone in that direction (or with his hand over the top part where the antenna was positioned). Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]? > because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo. > had Jobs lived to 70 or 80 Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna 1: https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-iphone-4-signal-strength-a-non-issue/ https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...

initramfs 4mo ago
Yes, I now realize it was the antennagate story. I included a link to a Slate article that featured an even more unsympathetic writer, which was in 2010, a year before Jobs died. In retrospect, I think Jobs knew his time was limited, and telling a customer not to hold it that way wasn't an unforgiveable sin- in fact, there was some truth to it, even if they didn't have a better modem at the time (my article mentions Qualcomm). And I agree, that yes, hubris is real. I like how Bill Gates told Jobs at the D7 Conference in 2007 that his charisma and spell wouldn't work on him because he was a minor wizard. https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-steve-jobs-was-wizard-who-cast-spells-2019-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-steve-jobs-w... Btw, an in-house modem is something Apple us finally returning to, now that they are ready: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2026/05/16/iphone-18-apple-will-change-key-phone-hardware-after-15-years/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2026/05/16/iphone-1...

bigbuppo 4mo ago

At least it's not the IPv8 guy again.

anenefan 4mo ago

No need to rebuild from ground up, sites just need a low data bandwidth fall back, perhaps with a new html tag indicating user is needing low bandwidth - much like sites used to provide a mobile ready area that was the same page load but simplified somewhat. For the bleakest of disasters, bandwidth would be a premium but a lot can still be done without bandwidth hogging scrip overheads, so site developers just need to include a low bandwidth fall back for the basics - I dare say it might even be lest costly for the LLM scrapers if it were widly adopted. I'd suggest for an idea of basics touring some sites where each page has a small footprint [1] [2] [3] [4] ... I recall days on dialup 3 KB/s - a meg was a wait-a-while. However I don't hold much hope, generally, things only happen out of necessity. [1] https://github.com/bradleytaunt/1kb.club https://github.com/bradleytaunt/1kb.club [2] https://250kb.club/ https://250kb.club/ [3] https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ [4] https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/

initramfs 4mo ago
I also contributed to one of those clubs. There's also 10KB club: https://github.com/spxy/10kbclub https://github.com/spxy/10kbclub https://github.com/marcus0x62/tinyblog https://github.com/marcus0x62/tinyblog
trashb 4mo ago
there is a whole lot out there. I personally like the following two also: https://nocss.club/ https://nocss.club/ https://no-html.club/index.txt https://no-html.club/index.txt (seems to be offline atm but archive.org has a captured version)

AuthAuth 4mo ago

Its always trying to cut bloat. Cant someone have a vision for a better internet that better caters to modern use cases and utilizes modern tech stacks to deliver the best possible experience? I dont see any value in going back to 100kb web pages

initramfs 4mo ago
yes and no. I agree there is some amazing things that can be done with larger websites, but one has to wade through a lot of unoptimal sites to find the good ones.
- AuthAuth 4mo ago
  Correct me if im wrong, but arent you trying to introduce a space where its impossible for larger websites to exist thus everything is restricted to the bare minimum website features like its 1999. I do not see the point in that, to me the problem isnt a blog with fancy JS vs a blog with static text. Its about corporations exerting outsized amounts of control over how people interact with the web. I want the new web to solve that problem and also be able to serve 4k video.
  - initramfs 4mo ago
    You can already do that. If your home page is a fediverse feed or client, the users provide the content without an algorithm. Many people who have a browser with a Google search bar might think corporations control a lot, but one can set a different browser, DNS, and search engine. The thing Steve Jobs did was simplify the out of the box experience, so when they bought a Mac, there'd only be a dock with Safari at the bottom. One could develop an open source machine with a very unitary goal of accessing a lightweight web using a protocol or extension similar to No script but the average non-technical user might not know how to do that. Of the many Linux distros I've tested, maybe a handful are actually easy to use and not heavy. One example is Bodhi Linux. But I have something more like Tiny Core Linux in mind, except polished (it features a dock, surprisingly). If the hardware could be developed for this too as open hardware, there would be the added advantage of it having more ways to improve it. I'm a bit oxymoronic in having a vertically integrated product idea and an open source bias, but a lot of great ideas need a coherent outline, which sometimes start out as closed source. If the project starts out with enthusiasm but it gets forked, then it becomes impossible to develop one feature that many people didn't realize would be overall a better user experience, or streamlined option, at the very least.

oso2k 4mo ago

I think we could learn from an old (gone?!) Google+ post from Ian Hickson on what could possibly replace HTML but a lot of the criteria applies to Web/Internet as a whole (https://www.sitepoint.com/will-html-ever-be-replaced/ https://www.sitepoint.com/will-html-ever-be-replaced/). Ian Hickson (“Hixie” — WHATWG specification editor, CSS2.1 co-editor and Google’s W3C representative) recently published an interesting post on Google+. He’s occasionally contacted by people suggesting a better alternative to HTML but, in all cases, none have come close. Ian states that any technology would need to satisfy at least five objectives to displace existing web technologies: Be devoid of licensing requirements. Be vendor-neutral and accept input from everyone. Be device and media-neutral; it should work on PCs, TVs, mobiles, tablets, screen readers and any future hardware. Be content-neutral and not restrict itself to types of document or application. Be radically better than the existing web in every way; faster, more usable, more features, easier to develop, easier to monetize, etc. HTML can fail objectives two and three. Technologies such as XHTML2 and XForms only satisfied one and three. Java and Flash struggle in all areas — and I’d also add Google’s Dart to that list. Maybe this all means there’s a place on the net for gopher, Gemini protocol, or tilde.town or ssh BBSes?

initramfs 4mo ago
Interesting link! I haven't heard of him, but I didn't have a new protocol in mind per se, since there are many old ones that are still good. But I would have removed the :// from http:// since even Tim Berners-Lee admitted that wasn't needed. I think HTML5 was an improvement from Flash, but there's a lot in the old web, like Xerox Star that had a smooth resolution in the files. Something like LaTeX..
- rapnie 4mo ago
  I first heard of him via "Towards a Modern Web Stack (Ian 'Hixie' Hickson)" on HN [0]. Quite interesting. Note that the submission link is broken, the google doc link is added below [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit?resourcekey=0-bPajpoo9IBZpG__-uCBE6w https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...

jocelyner 4mo ago

[flagged]

1970-01-01 4mo ago

So Internet2, but with less research? https://internet2.edu/network/ https://internet2.edu/network/

acuozzo 4mo ago

Can you pay for The Thinnernet with Thnickels? https://thick-coins.net https://thick-coins.net

majicDave 4mo ago

I have been working on an alternative to http, and the thinking comes from the same place, thank you for sharing. I still have a way to go, but it's definitely possible, and it is definitely a good idea, I'm very excited about http alternatives in general, we should have many. https://github.com/mjdave/katipo https://github.com/mjdave/katipo

fhn 4mo ago
thanks for being MITM
- majicDave 4mo ago
  Not sure I understand exactly, but I have no desire to host trackers, the idea is that either the client or the host will be hosting their own trackers, or going through some third party trusted tracker hosting service.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    So a tracker is what you called a router. Weird name.
- initramfs 4mo ago
  Awesome. Starred.

aleph_minus_one 4mo ago

I have the impression that the author does not want to build a parallel internet (which involves whole new protocols replacing, say, IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4, ICMPv6, DNS, perhaps TLS, ...), but rather another application-level protocol replacing HTTP and the web. Remember that the world wide web is just one of insanely many application-level protocols that can be run over the internet infrastructure.

initramfs 4mo ago
Correct. The idea is to narrow the application access view from the desktop or home screen of a mobile device to a limited set of optimized apps and protocols that can traverse the web. It's kind of like a dedicated bike lane alongside a boulevard in a major city. One can bike as fast if not faster than cars, but they'd need to adhere to the rules of the bike path.

voidUpdate 4mo ago

I feel like I missed where exactly the parallel part splits. Do they want to make new wires? New fibre protocols? A new TCP/IP stack? Just make another Gopher/Gemini?

initramfs 4mo ago
It's more like a virtual network alongside the actual one, with a dedicated bike path separated by a curb and a sidewalk.

tancop 4mo ago

what about going in the other direction? apps instead of sites. wasm for everything, shared immutable libraries, strict capability based security. client side rendering where you can choose between html+css, new binary formats or doing everything from code. easy server overrides so you can redirect all requests from bigtech.com to service.mydomain.net without the app ever knowing. encourage federation and sharing instead of isolation (but thats more of a culture problem new tech cant really solve). put the user back in control.

spacebacon 4mo ago
This seems like the natural direction for me.

kangaroozach 4mo ago

https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/

spencerflem 4mo ago

I don’t understand the vision in the blog post, but I’m very excited to try out the Arcan-net as described in http://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/ http://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/

charcircuit 4mo ago

Why not use those extra fiber optic cables as part of the actual internet? You can immediately start making money off of it due to people getting legitimate value from it. If other lines were to be cut or have issues your lines would act as a backup. And yes if things got overloaded it would act slower. It seems unoptimal to make a completely separate network.

OhioMan2943 4mo ago

God hn has so many projects that never go anywhere

ilaksh 4mo ago

https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet