An Emacs Internet... Orgnet?

I know of many people who are a bit fed up with the current state of the web. On the one hand, we can use EWW for text and image only web interactions, but on the other hand finding websites that are intended to be viewed in a text based browser can be a challenge. I'm wondering if anyone has thought about trying to serve org documents directly, and use emacs as the browser. Org is basically equivalent to html in expressive power, and in places where it's not, it can be extended. Most websites would do well to be formatted like an org document and I'm sure many here would *prefer* reading documents online in org format, since if they were, then we'd get the benefit of emacs style navigation through them on the user's terms. What intrigues me about this idea is the fact that it could be implemented as a layer on top of the pre-existing org ecosystem: * saving org pages in their original format is trivial * appearance is also on the user's terms, so they can focus on the work. Also, no longer any need to worry about styling web pages * no need, then, to go through a static site generator (if one is fine with only reaching the _orgnet_) * an individual or two could open a host and users can submit their orgnet sites directly, which seems reasonably inexpensive considering how relatively small plaintext is these days. I've just been wondering about alternatives to the world wide web. Gemini seems to be the only modern viable alternative, but it has its own ecosystem and seems somewhat closed. Emacs already has a culture of openness and welcomes new people, which might blend better. This is of course purely a curiosity of mine, and even if there is interest, I doubt I'll ever get around to implementing this. I'm just wondering if anyone else has considered this. Extra: I'm thinking that a simple version could actually be implemented in just a few hundred lines of elisp if all that happens is downloading plaintext org files over https with a command line tool like wget (or however EWW does it) and loading it into a non-editable org buffer.

https://github.com/emacsmirror/elpher

> Org is basically equivalent to html in expressive power, and in places where it's not, it can be extended. Most websites would do well to be formatted like an org document Every part of these statements is false, or would require one to so narrowly-define "website" and "html" as to be laughable. I love emacs, and love org, but the web is one of the greatest achievements of humanity, and you should better understand it before you demean it like this. :)

I agree but just to a certain extent and suggest an experience I've done: try just reading feeds in org-mode, org-feed works enough but that's not the point, the point is that org-mode is meant for attentive reading, while the web is meant for distracted consumption. I mean: we have too much low/mildly interesting text to skim read to use org-mode, it's the similar reason some prefer modern feed readers like miniflux instead of elfeed: they are on par in term of features (beside the reader future to fetch articles in badly made feeds) but the issue arise in attention terms: elfeed is designed to read all posts, at least their headline, web-based ones to skim and cherry pick. Of course that's not a good thing, but producing quality contents/source them it's not a tool but a social problem that can't be solved with a tool... I agree on contrary on the need of a non-web communications means, like the classic usenet, the classic emails, so something decentralized that no one really own or can steer much as modern proprietary platforms and the need of machine processable data together with human processable data witch means active docs where we can have tables, but with them spreadsheet-alike abilities, graph plotting, live code to be executed inside etc AND that's have no reason to be local AND limited to local only, for instance it would be very nice to have wikidata integrated on Emacs so when a young teenager student do a small demographic research can live query from he's/she's notes wikidata for relevant infos, live change the "slide" side etc not differently than a trader, a programmer, a scientist, a journalist etc. Just imaging if you note something about a news on some VIP, a function with the point of it's name and you get an org-mode link to it's public bibliography, no google search need. This non-web system means anyone can publish data and anyone can retrieve from them, we have had something alike long ago, the Xerox Star Office System, we have had something similar in concept with Plan 9 so it's not a futuristic thing we can't reach but something already done and abandoned because of commercial reasons, so something that can be done today, only not just with the right tool, we need a certain mass of humans who want to join such new web and here came the issue: even if we have now a hyper-good and ready tool with relevant distributed backend, query language, video tutorials, docs, ... anything with no contents it's just useless. Until there is not enough contents only very few will embrace it and very few can't make enough contents to attract many others... Having lost public universities, public research, big corporate state sponsored labs etc we miss the needed social base to advance. I have unfortunately no idea how this can be recovered before a WWIII/a hyper-big disaster that force anyone to rebuild anything...

Honestly gopher solve the wrong issue: http/web 1.0 are not that bad, actually they are even good for their purpose and gopher is not really good as a substitute. The bad part is the evolution of web 1.0 that's was not much due to the tech/design basis but the commercial push. A tool can't solve a social issue. Only society can solve a social issue, also building the tools of the trade, but in the process of solving the issue socially, not up front with the tool sold as the solution.

Basically, this is what I was referring to at the end of [my EmacsConf21 talk](https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/org-outside/) where I combined the idea of [Orgdown](https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/) with gemini. It'd be a nice approach, although I probably would prefer a revival of the Usenet instead. Mostly because I do see more chances of realization.

Hmm. Can you point to a component of HTML that doesn't have an analog in org's syntax?

>the point is that org-mode is meant for attentive reading, while the web is meant for distracted consumption. This is missing the point: When someone decides to publish a document formatted with org, it is much more likely that it will be thoughtfully laid out and great care put into it. This is riffing off of the views presented here: [https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html](https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html) In my experience on the web, every website that is statically generated in emacs, only contains work that one would not mind at all carefully reading. (Some of the good ones use markdown, alas.) The Web has been *poisoned* by distracted consumption, but it was never *meant* for distracted consumption. I guess if you like a service of skimming only through stuff that shouldn't require focused reading, then you have a point.

Sure, in theory, sure in outcome, but IME not in practice: yes if you write a document in org-mode probably this very document will be written with care and attention and a read who read it will be interesting in attentive reading, unfortunately the web evolve toward distraction not only because someone is interested but because of the web itself, the size of the network, we can't really do much about that. I mean: people who read carefully typically read a lot, typically are interested in various topics. In a well-done org-mode web/web 1.0 those people start willingly producing and consuming high quality docs. Such community grow and grow and the number of high quality and interesting docs grow. At a certain point in time even the most disciplined attentive reader will start to skim wanting to read "too much" because there are "too much" publications who interest him/her. I can't know who you are in reading habits terms but perhaps you can share a similar reading pattern: if you read and like to read books probably you start to see many little but interesting books and so start to buy them more and more. They start to pile up a bit. You start reading one, perhaps the first chapter, the switching to another, another first chapter and so one. At a certain point in time you can either reduce the amount of books you buy or loose concentration in reading and start skimming. Now books need to be bough take physical space etc, websites far, far, far less, RSS help to follow many etc so the incentive is to consume more, not less, there are no marginal costs in that. I do not like skimming personally, but I like many things, from politics to renewable to geopolitics, history, materials engineering/lightweight structure, aerodynamics, natural stuff, off road stuff, IT stuff, ... I can't really read anything, study anything and also have a physical life. Something I read attentively but most of the rest is just a quick skim as a mean to select what to read attentively and being up to date... org-mode for me are notes, org-roam managed or something similar, for docs I still use plain LaTeX just because crafting a full document in org-mode feel unnatural to me, it's ok crafting slides (epresent and similar, all in EXWM), it's ok for personal work but for sharing not much partially because my public does not use org-mode for most and partially because my org mode is not the same of someone else, links break easily, visual aspect change etc... I've dreamed an org-mode web but after some experiments I conclude that's just a dream... I hope someone can prove I'm wrong of course, that's just what I collect and observed so far.

HTML is just a format, and you want to use emacs as the renderer. But the true power of the internet and on top of that, the web, comes from the underlying protocols and mechanisms: http, TCP, ip. HTTP itself is pretty massive: headers, streaming, caching. Try to describe the ideas of hypertext, make a deepdive, and you will see why Tim was and is babbling about linked documents and self serving data cubes. Org doesn't cover it. Not even emacs.

Thats basically what Tony Aldon has done. I don't bother to read his posts on Reddit, I just git pull his [posts.org repo](https://github.com/tonyaldon/posts). We just need people to have their org-mode blog posts in a separate git repo, [ox-hugo](https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/) and [lazyblorg](https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg) makes this workflow easy. I don't think we even need a line of code. Just this practice normalized.

Fair enough, but consider gemini rather than gopher (elpher can browse both).

Wouldn't a codec on top of eww do the trick? E.g. translating equivalent html tags to org's and then gownloading the associated picks and/or videos and replacing the links to point to those downloaded.

I do, but I do not consider gemini a solution, it's a gopher improvement, but share the same issue of trying to be "an alternative to" something already exists and that's spread and known instead of being something totally different that offer more than the actual state of things. For instance: usenet is not new, but offer a decentralized network where anyone can grab posts from groups hosted by countless third parties or hosting them autonomously with a lightweight single binary and not much setup (leafnode for instance). So offering a modern nntp client instead of Reddit or HN is a reasonable thing: - no one own it, users can download posts they like, search full-text in them locally, self-moderate instead of being moderate by third parties they do not chose [1], with possibility of attachments (binary groups, nowadays popular again for pirate file sharing, see Radarr, Lidarr, Sonarr series, so something really effective even if base64 encoded) etc - posts are personal, in the sense we can save them locally, we can bypass the network itself via mail for those who chose to give a mail (perhaps an alias) That's not "an alternative" but a different tool with better outcome. Similarly proposing a ZeroNet-alike web is a different tool for a better outcome than the actual client-server web. Anyone can share their own websites without needing third parties to host them outside NAT, for instance. Jami is another different tool for VoIP nor "an alternative to Zoom" like BBB. Wormhole is another tool not an alternative for wetransfer&co etc I hope that's clarify my point a bit :-) [1] that's not a usenet rule, of course, but it's perfectly doable, news already have the killfile, making a group not moderated is easy, spammers can push spam, so can overload a bit some servers but those spam got axed by users simple bayesian filters.

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upvote for the lols

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Congratulations! You basically reinvented Gemini but with org, which can already be done

i use both miniflux and elfeed and i wouldn't agree that they're designed for different types of reading. both present you with a list of headlines, and both give you the option to mark as read without actually reading the article. miniflux doesn't have as advanced a filtering/search system as elfeed, but other than that they're very similar interfaces

If you are fed up with the current state of the internet you might be interested in Gemini https://gemini.circumlunar.space and emacs has a decent browser for it https://github.com/emacsmirror/elpher

Perhaps not formally, in UI terms they seems to be equivalent, but did you try both, recording the screen on day after another to a week and that roughly measuring how much time you spent in one and the other given that the feeds are essentially the same and you are "at home" in both reader? Personally I see a roughly mean of 1h/day usage in miniflux, against 1h23'/day in elfeed. Of course that's not much science and real statistic but still mean something: I'm quicker in miniflux than elfeed reading the same feeds (so ~ the same number of posts per day on average). On contrary my saved (linked) posts in org-mode notes on various topic depict a more volume and better quality annotations from elfeed than from miniflux. With miniflux due to it's web-nature that obstacle easy integration I just tend to capture the output of "Copy as org-mode" firefox extension while on elfeed I tend to add proper comments and crafting my notes in a far more useful manner instead being more like a info+dump for future research. I see the same pattern reading feeds with different UIs: notmuch/RSS2email and org-mode via org-feed; with both I have the same elfeed outcome, more time and more quality, with miniflux, RSSOwl, less quality less time. My conclusion is that the classic text-centric UI is better for quality and slower than the modern one, quicker but to skim only. I extend with arrogance a similar pattern for book/on-paper reading vs screen reading. Not done a real research but I arrogantly and proofless suppose that behind those phenomenon there is a common pattern, I do not know much about it, psychology, ergonomics etc are not much my fields but that's is, to be taken with care...