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I have a feeling the web in few years will be completely unusable for various reasons. Be it how easy it will be to spam any place with AI, or how much of stuff is locked behind walled gardens that are hard to escape. It would be good to do something about it. I thought an open platform like mastodon could be useful. Obviously stuff like activity pub platforms exists, so why make this? I think they suffer from two problems. One is that they try to compete with existing platforms, which is hard to do as there really is not enough of a reason to use mastodon instead of twitter for the average user. Second one is I feel they always feel weird or clunky to use. I want to put highest priority on usability, even if it goes a bit against decentralization or openness. Stuff like hosting the client code under one domain, while letting the servers be decentralized would help as there would be no confusion on where to go to. Below are few ideas I have for it. I really don't mind any criticism, so if you can, please write any bad thing you see about this. The more faults you find the better. 1: Account based on trees & groups. To avoid bots or just bad accounts in general, I think having an invite system which saves who invited who would be useful. As when an account joins which only invites other terrible accounts it will be easy to see where the problem is. Further, you should be grouped in small groups of like 100ish people that self moderate themselves. As that's easily doable and scalable. There might be worry that it hurts free speech and what not, but I don't think it does as you can just host your own instance without issues. As hosting is not free, you can't really create lot of spam unless you have lot of money to spare. Even then, if some instance has only trash it should ring the bells 2: No microblogging, replace it with page makers I would say microblogging (or short format content in general) is terrible as it makes you read and write clickbait. You can't have nuanced discussion in few hundred characters. I think it needs to be replaced with web pages. You should have some editor to easily write documents that preferably work fine on pc as well as mobile screens. You could still make funny short comments, but it wouldn't be the main focus. As documents are pretty broad, you could publish also anything on them. There would be no restraint to text, as videos, images and maybe interactive content could be put on them. So it's something closer to neocities then twitter. 3: Comments replaced by links instead of commenting on any posts, you could just link it in your posts. There could be two link options. One like the regular links on the web, and an other one which is a two way link (think of how replies on image boards work), so that whoever you linked can see that you linked them. I would say that's important as it keeps a structure instead of the endless stream of comments that happens on most platforms that make it just harder to find stuff. 3: Mobile support Most people do lot of reading, watching, etc on the phone. And it should be a pleasant experience to use it on your phone. 4: More focus on offline interaction To avoid the spread of loneliness that happens because of computer use, I think it should be easy to make real life plans and meetups. There really is nothing that can replace face to face conversation, and provided there is trust, I wouldn't mind it for it to be able to schedule some event in just few clicks and have potential visitors quickly glance how far it is away from them and see who else will be joining. 5: RSS feed & easy subscribe It's a nice as it still has lot of support on every web browser. It's just a bit clunky to use as you get hit with this weird blob of text for which you need scares some. It would be easier if it was build into the client to just subscribe to rss feeds with one button. For that matter, whenever you upload something, you should have an option to put it in your RSS Feed too with one click. 6: Monetization (probably better to do later) Last I think there should be an option to pay for stuff on it. There's lot of work people do online which would be nice if you could easily support. Now there's stuff like patreon, but maybe we could make something that less like a big platform and more like a regular old decentralized marketplace. That way you could have people support themselves if they provide good content that other want to pay for. It will be difficult to implement though, so maybe this should be left as an afterthought for later. That's what I have in my head as of now. Like I said before, I really want some feedback on this to spot issues or even see if there's interests in this. I want to try developing a small protoype for this and publish the source code for it in upcoming weeks/months. From there I would want to see what would be good to change or alter, and what stuff seems to work. What do you think?

>>68683 These are all good thoughts, but consider that one person can't easily bring a new paradigm into being by themselves, and there are now various growing dev communities organizing around creating a new iteration on the ideas of Mastodon, all already competing to be its successor. I'm working on a Nostr client for instance. It's much nicer building ideas grounded in shared conceptual frameworks that are actively being worked on, because tons of feedback is there to start with, problems already considered and solved. I can see people being excited about specific things that I've also wanted to do, and then prioritize, I can see what's being done that worked and hasn't worked. I really think you should check it out. To "do something about it" the best way is a collaboration.

>>68684 >I'm working on a Nostr client for instance. It's much nicer building ideas grounded in shared conceptual frameworks that are actively being worked on, because tons of feedback is there to start with, You are completely right it's better to do stuff in shared conceptual frameworks. But I have a feeling that the solutions that are out there are just not enough. I looked into Nostr and what it does right is that it's actually implementable by a human. Activity pub on the other hand is a mess. I also really love that it's not dependent on specfic server. I might try building off it too. But I'm also afraid it's too narrow. There are really lot of other issues that need adressed. I really think an average person, provided they put in a bit of effort, should be able to create any kind of content. Right now you are restricted to short text/image/video messages on software with usually pretty bad UI, which makes things needlessly complicated. It should be possible to just edit a page and add whatever you want on it with some visual tools that a child could grasp. Trust is an other issue. As lot of decentralized software depends on the model of you being able to trust no one. Which creates trust but it's very brittle one as you need to live with this assumption that everyone is out there to get you. Crypto stuff comes to mind as it works, till you lose your wallet, which happens. People lose stuff all the time. I feel it's not a good model to follow in case of something like accounts, it should be able to contact someone to help you out somehow if you lost it. It's just nicer to be somewhere and knowing you can rely on people instead of needing to rely just on yourself. I might be pushing this too far, but if we imagine a nice place to live, it's one where you can walk the street without any protection as you know you are safe, and what we have now is you walking outside in a bulletproof vest cause you know once you drop it you are an easy target.

>>68683 A key part of agenda 2030 is to make the internet as unusable as feasibly possible in terms of using the internet for actual good for the individual or the group of humanity. We have definitely entered the faze of Web 3.0 now, and its only just begun.

>>68701 >Activity pub on the other hand is a mess. Yeah I looked into building on it way back and felt pretty stupid, could not grok it whatsoever. >Right now you are restricted to short text/image/video messages on software with usually pretty bad UI, which makes things needlessly complicated. It should be possible to just edit a page and add whatever you want on it with some visual tools that a child could grasp. With a flexible open source protocol, this should just be a matter of building a client application with these features no? >Crypto stuff comes to mind as it works, till you lose your wallet, which happens. People lose stuff all the time. I feel it's not a good model to follow in case of something like accounts, it should be able to contact someone to help you out somehow if you lost it. It's just nicer to be somewhere and knowing you can rely on people instead of needing to rely just on yourself. I am personally a fan of adversarial paranoid computing where you trust no one, but there is a simple way to do what you're talking about on Nostr that fits into the existing milieu: write a client that prioritizes NIP-05 (https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/05.md) providers over npub for identity, and includes features for updating contact lists on that basis in the case of fumbled keys. >I might try building off it too. Hope you do, your ideas are good and I think it would benefit from your influence. Consider browsing the Telegram, a lot of discussion happens there.

>>68683 its been unusable since 2008. since 2011 it was unusable for tor heck it was hardly usable in 2003

>>68736 From my own personal experiences I started to find the internet more tedious closer to around 2014. For my own operations I was fine until around that time period. Things were perfect as far as I was concerned during the 2000s. The 90s was pretty nice as well but there certainly was limitations. I also didn't spend close to 3/4 of my time awake sitting in front of a screen back then. I actually went outside having hobbies and interests in meatspace.

You can make small federated communities that act more or less on a nonprofit basis, and such communities already exist (Riseup, Mastodon, PeerTube, private trackers), but I think those are always gonna be fringe circles and not the norm. Even when those communities are very small, they take a lot of money to ensure the servers are running 24/7 (even Riseup aggressively begs for donations from time to time). People need to be ready to give back to websites worth using, and a lot of people so far just won't even when they have the means. Ads should be completely off the table since they're the main villain in the story. I'm torn about invite systems. You have to choose between basing it on private trackers that are extremely hard to get into and notorious for handing out wide tree bans affecting dozens of innocents or Riseup whose system respects privacy better but is incredibly prone to abuse. As much an asocial nerd as I am, the Internet's been getting so boring I actually like the idea of doing more stuff IRL, but I also know this is only an option for huge city dwellers. Not to mention it's gonna be hard to gather users of small fragmented online communities in the same IRL place.

>You can't have nuanced discussion in few hundred characters. On the contrary, you can't have any discussion in more than few hundred characters. That isn't discussion, that is taking turns writing about a similar topic, which is what we do on lainchan, and I love it. >3: Comments replaced by links This exact idea, down to every detail you mentioned, I thought of aswell. >4: More focus on offline interaction This exact idea, I thought of aswell: a discussion site that tricks you into making friends. My idea would be more like discord. There would be a secure direct message feature, like signal, but it would also have a penpal feature, where it puts you into a 1 on 1 discussion that lasts indefinitely. This 1 on 1 discussion would eventually turn into a friendship. I'm almost 19 and I've never had a freind...if I had a friend I would use lainchan once a week and no other discussion sites or applications.

You can't fix social problems with technology. Web works the way it works because humans use it. You can't tech your way out of it. There's no magical panacea, no silver bullet, no easy answers, just slow, complicated and difficult combinations of legal, cultural, political, business and technology shifts.

>>70524 You can't fix social problems with technology but you can design better technology and then use it to fix social problems. If you deny that tools can be used for purposes than I don't know what to tell you.

>>70524 Social problems, of course, magically pop into existence from the aether, and certainly have no technological basis.

>>70527 Not in this case, that's a utopian illusion. Example. Spam on the internet has been a problem since the 80s, have we fixed it with technology? No, it's just morphed into new forms. Same with pop-ups, piracy, astroturfing and so on. Web is a social phenomenon and you can't alter people with systems.

>>70534 Eh. Spam as always been a thing even before the internet. Getting junk mail in your inbox is no different virtually or physically. Spam is never going to go away. Internet just opened an avenue for spam with a greater reach. But, the internet widen the access to information of any kind. (for better or for worst) One can say the easier access to that information benefits society to better education of any kind. Whether it, or the kind of education, is good or bad is not of question here. You cannot deny the value internet brings to an academic level. (Hell, Usenet was meant for academic purposes at first, iirc.) That said, there are some things we can fix using technology, but we cannot fix everything with technology. Especially problems existing long before the wide spread of tech. I would be a fool to think so. Some things just cannot change unless we change fundamentals.

>>70534 The old spam forms were fixed. Your'e in a virus vs immune system conflict that keeps going. Giving up is not a solution. The primary concern for today is getting rid of bot posters. The problem is they are getting increasingly better and already act smarter than the dumber humans. Ultimately you might have to rely on IRL meetups where you exchange private keys for online communication. From that build a trust network based on you trust person a and he trusts person b so you assume b is real. You can furthermore assign values 0-10/10 to modify trust like you might take a look on your clueless friends friend list but yo dont trust him to filter people well.

>>70520 I like the idea around penpals, I'm somewhat tempted to implement it for a small side project. End to end encrypted and whatnot. It sounds fun.

>>68683 >2023 >I have a feeling the web in few years will be completely unusable for various reasons it has been completely unusable since conception you dumb bluepilled lainniggers. it was never meant to work, it was some bewmers tech demo to show to his boss or some bullshit. it also became hyper unusable in 2011 when cloudflare blocked tor from around 50% of pages (now 90% or whatever)

>>70677 >it was some bewmers tech demo to show to his boss or some bullshit I've never heard that, but it makes sense, considering how poorly it works.

>Stuff like hosting the client code under one domain, while letting the servers be decentralized would help as there would be no confusion on where to go to. I have a couple worries about this. 1. All servers are dependent on one server for them to work. If the main server goes down, every server in this semi-fediverse will be unusable. What you're think about is kinda like reddit but with the burden of storing all the content for all the communities being on individuals hosting servers instead of a single centralized company hosting said servers. Mastodon is fully decentralized. No instance is dependent on each other. I do wish Mastodon instances could be more tightly knit together and be easier to communicate between as it kinda just feels like you're using a small platform with a tiny link to the rest of the fediverse. So I guess it would make cross-communication easier but it just doesn't really seem to be worth the trade-offs.

>>68683 > I thought an open platform like mastodon could be useful. It have been designed to be a mosaic of captive communities tat refuse to open to the others. Let me ask you a question: if you can't tell if the person you are talking to is a person, a program or a trained monkey, does it matter? I think what it have to say is what matter.

>>70544 >Ultimately you might have to rely on IRL meetups where you exchange private keys for online communication. That's a social solution. You don't need new tech for that, you could do that 40 years ago. >The primary concern for today is getting rid of bot posters. It's not a problem. It's not really that difficult either, it's not done because it makes no business sense. Bots are traffic and bots are engagement and traffic and engagement are ad money. It's a function of a business model of social media companies. Yeah, ultimately it's a scam but nobody actually cares.

>>68683 Op maybe you should consider the financial incentive. Removing it completely, people will put information there for the sake of putting it, will interact for the sole purpose of interaction. Bots can be useful, but bots on social media that interact with you are done to create credibility to pose as a real person, why? Financial gain in using it later on to promote brands or other things. Why there are no bots here? Who will have any financial gain posting random stuff to laions? Nobody. Web is already dead, most google searches return an utter amount of misleading information, 5000 words to tell the history of pasta, just to give you a recipe for a simple tomato sauce. Everything is SEO optimized which means artificially trying to make you waste time. My takes, use nostr, or any decentralized communication platform that rely on encryption and have a few available consumption patterns (chat/public/etc...). Use email, and rely on LLaMA/offline wikipedia/zeal/books/papers as your source of information. RSS still a thing, have a blog, put your thoughts there, subscribe to other's RSS, and publish yours. Forums still a thing, as image boards, hence where we are speaking right now. The web doesn't need anything new, is just a change in culture of the user that is needed. You may argue that the masses will never operate like this, that is true. But if you want to be where the masses are, you need to be one of them, and they go for the easy to use aka no brain needed. >>68683 >4: More focus on offline interaction This happens all the time, I have a few meetups in which we teach newbies cool things like soldering and basic electronic stuff with arduinos and ESPs. This is named hackerspace, this concept has been around since the 70s AFAIK, probably earlier than that. Op, you are focusing too much on how to migrate normal people into a better platform. There are already much better alternatives for quit a while around, normal people don't use it because they just don't want.

>>71026 you just explained why the web is bad there is no way to query data other than click on things so you have to use a website to query data for you (like google) and naturally because human greedy those are all garbage it can be replaces with external querying tools like it should have in 1985 (yeah the internet existed then the web is irrelevant lol) there is no way to even just navigate pages, you have to execute code. the tech solution is to not have executing arbitrary code as part of the protocol. >>70534 >popups are totally unsolvable bro its not like you can just not have them in your protocol >saying piracy like its a problem or something oh no, its retarded. the web is for piracy, it doesnt work because it doesnt allow piracy. piracy is just mirroring content for you. since content is not automatically mirrored like in any sane network, you have to host it all and pay to host it

>>70524 "out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made"

>>68683 >I have a feeling the web in few years will be completely unusable for various reasons. Be it how easy it will be to spam any place with AI, or how much of stuff is locked behind walled gardens that are hard to escape. You were spot on. Google has merged WEI into the Chromium repository. This paves the way for web DRMs that could deny you access to a website because of your add-ons, browser or OS. It's never been clearer Google fully intends to kill free software. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/web_environment_integrity_is_an_all_out_attack_on_free_internet>>68683

This is related and probably does not deserve its own thread. I will soon make an application, similar to imageboards, but distinct, called Pink Flag. It will cost $5 to create an account, and we will only terminate an account for one of two reasons: 1. Bot detected. 2. User intentionally and repeatedly makes posts to try to invoke negative emotion in others. We'll also have post filter to filter out NSFW images (which will also filter CSAM). The $5 is to prevent bots.

I would love to have access to all the structured and categorized data scraped by OpenAI. AI is snake oil, but raw access to those datasets would let you build really powerful information retrieval applications. I don't know why AI people are so obsessed with building conversational chatbots.

>>72209 >$5 Ok, that can be swallowed. >User intentionally and repeatedly makes posts to try to invoke negative emotion in others. I'll rephrase it so that people can understand this statement better: >There are no rules. For mods as well. Enjoy your $5 going into oblivion. >We'll also have post filter to filter out NSFW images (which will also filter CSAM) Filtering out NSFW is lame. It's nice when people are able to share some cool NSFW art, I'm a judge of it myself. I want you to know that I understand your intention. Permission to post NSFW is known to turn sites into porn hubs and there are not any good reasons for hosting yet another porn hub. I'm not sure how to handle this situation gracefully as I have no experience moderating any sites nor am I willing to obtain such. But I'm a part of a one very small self-moderated online community (don't waste your breath asking for a link) and I've come to appreciate how we exchange some sensitive content we like through giving link to source and posting an innocent picture instead. Maybe that's the solution?

>>72213 I see your point, but there will be no context for NSFW content to be posted, atleast not enough content to risk people being able to post illegal child no-no pictures. There will be topic of the day, and none of the topics will be for sharing NSFW images. Instead of displaying posts like a thread, it displays the most recent reply chain, but you can press 'n' on your keyboard and it will show you a random reply chain from the past 90 minutes (it will never show you the same one twice). There will be also a button where you can suggest a topic, and to suggest a topic: you have to include atleast a paragraph which is to be the "Info" of the topic. There is an archive that shows each day (it will be as if you're on that very day). The longest reply chain can be eight posts. There will be a button "Info" that gives you info for the topic of the day, such as suggestions for what to post (videos, images, messages, swf files), or it can detail the specifics invasion for when an invasion is the topic of the day. We'll ensure the topics are VERY high quality and have a charm to them, such as a topic of the day on lovequesting, and people can discuss cold approaching and bumble, and any other idea for lovequestion. You can only view upto 64 reply chains per day, and make upto three posts you can mark a post that you'd like to reply to it, then when you've seen all 64 reply chains, it will show you the ones you selected and you can choose upto three to reply to, when your replies are in order you can click a button and bam they are sent and you can no longer use Pink Flag to view or post, until the next day. There is not exactly an "account" system like other programs have, you cannot sign in or out, if you download it then there is a prompt to give $5 via credit card, debit card, or monero, once you do you can use it, if you uninstall it, or install it on another computer, you must give $5 again. My ideal userbase would be ~1,000 daily users, hopefully 'based', autistic, male.

>>72241 >there will be no context for NSFW content to be posted OK that's better. >most recent reply chain Which is a thread. No? >but you can press 'n' Literally /random/ superboard. > The longest reply chain can be eight posts. Why so small? >We'll ensure the topics are VERY high quality >VERY Literally, how? >You can only view upto 64 reply chains per day Thank you for caring for my eyes. >make upto three posts Godly limitation. I fully approve. >Pink Flag What's that? >you must give $5 again I'd sooner find and rape you. >hopefully Yeah, LMAO, hopefully. Please do better.

>>72242 >>most recent reply chain >Which is a thread. No? No. It would be a reply to a thread, and the post they quote, and the post they quote, all the way upto the original post. >>The longest reply chain can be eight posts. >Why so small? Its not small atall, most reply chains are two to five posts. >>We'll ensure the topics are VERY high quality >Literally, how? If someone recomends a low quality one we'll ignore it. >>You can only view upto 64 reply chains per day >Thank you for caring for my eyes. You're welcome :D >>make upto three posts >>Pink Flag >What's that? That's what I will call the application, you dumb nigger. Its a cool name and the icon would be derived from the name. >>you must give $5 again >I'd sooner find and rape you. :DDD

>>68683 the web was always completely unusable imagine researching recipes for a minute as if you guys didnt only eat junk food you will get a bunch of bullshit made to look easy and made easy for your attention span that is SEOd to the top there isnt even an alternative. 99% of content is just this now what if you want to filter by ingredients? you have to use a web interface that is loaded by that specific website (that specific data source) but then you only get to search the recipes on that website, which has either one author or a small community of them its basically worthless and this has been a problem with the web since day 1. everything is fundamentally broken like this. this is just one example. what else do we have? retard soykaf like CSRF and X.509 also every website does its GUI from scratch or from some moronic standard like those cookie popups with their terrible broken half working GUIs that result in every website adopting the same broken soykaf webshitters cannot into GUI. every chan too has some fuarrrktarded soykaf every time you try and post. like other chans will serve you a captcha for session then another per post and on top of that there are like 4 bugs that can happen during filling those captchas out and they also have terrible GUIs that dont make it easy to rechallenge probably as a result of some fuarrrkjob nocoder succumbing the cognitive dissonance of some fallacy in his head like "the user could cheat cuz dis allowz him to make captcha attempts faster". this is why you dont let random retards design the GUI. you make a chan protocol and make implementations. the web is broken soley for this reason, but thousands of others equally as big

>>72252 The different GUIs are appealing. Mootxi.co and Wapchan.org specifically have really cool GUIs.

>>72241 >NOOO U CANT POST IMAGES TEHN SOME1 CULD POST A CEEPEEE! literal pedo logic. no normal person considers this when they made one of the billions of websites between 1995 and now.