Eniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)Can we just like, build a new protocol for an alternative web? Maybe something that's way easier/more accessible to create sites for? Cause it's starting to look like http is an evolutionary dead end since it got taken over by megacorps
Idk maybe we should just go back to BBSes
Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤@eniko I do want this
.ex//weis@eniko I've seen a few people doing this! My technical know how isn't there yet, but I'd love to learn how to do it too.
Brianna Townsend
Gen X-Wing
Yoji@eniko (sitting on the porch of a creepy swamp cabin, a sign swinging on a nearby dock reading "phpBB")
"Go back?" Missy, some of us never LEFT.
Manuel Correia@eniko
I just brought my gane design blog back to life!
I just brought my gane design blog back to life!
ferunando@eniko yeah. bbs, anonymous telnet, irc...
TommyTorty10@eniko no joke, the one BBS Im in is my favorite social media by far, even above Cohost
Jo@eniko have you seen neocities? It's not the same, but it seems kinda cute
@duckidentity I've heard of it
Rev. GothAlice@eniko I've legit not stopped testing (for accessibility) under lynx. That may or may not have been my first "web browser" on a green-screen WYSE terminal hooked up to a BSD serial hydra / port replicator host. (Along with PINE for e-mail and Usenet…)
BBSes were great; there's something inherently more personal about hearing that V.90 establishment handshake.
Oblomov@eniko
Gemini would do, although IMO it's throwing out the baby with the bathwater in some things.
Gemini would do, although IMO it's throwing out the baby with the bathwater in some things.
@oblomov what's that?
@eniko
The Gemini protocol, something halfway between Gopher and HTTPS in terms of complexity, with some interesting features.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Outfrost@eniko I've thought about this too, on the HTML/CSS/JS side, because it's an entire pile of living tech debt
Andrew@andrewt I think that's the direction the current stack tried to take things, and it clearly didn't work out.
Catelyn 
@eniko if we do can we please use a language that is Not Javascript that actually makes sense
@eniko at the bare minimum lua doesn't try to do as much type juggling, but really it should be a statically typed language
sarah tonin 
@catgirlQueer @eniko a statically typed vm where a language could just compile to it, or have its own runtime on top of the vm, sounds nicer.
Nasado@nasado @catgirlQueer @eniko yes but that as the base for clientside scripting, rather than just some kind of extension.
@SRAZKVT @catgirlQueer @eniko Absolutely agree, JS was a mistake for several dozen reasons. Just pointing out that there's no need to design and implement a new VM from scratch.
Adrian Lorenzana 
@eniko @catgirlQueer Omg coming back here because I went to go look at hosting a Gemini page for fun and found some server software that allows for inline lua and remembered i saw this in the replies lmao
Neil E. Hodges@eniko Let's just continue with HTTP 1.1.
The Sarapparatus@eniko http3D: webGL but it doesn't require html, the entire internet is just a shitty unity asset flip
@eniko more seriously, i honestly think that switching to some other way of transmitting the web won't change how corps abuse it.
The best i can think of is something like a stricter CORS or for browsers to implement a feature where they show users a permission popup every. single. time. a webpage makes a request to a server.
Kind of like how iOS adding the requirement for apps to ask for permission to track people caused facebook to panic.
@eniko well, there's gemini... idk how it is, but it's a thing
I don't think the transfer protocol is the problem, tho?
I don't think the transfer protocol is the problem, tho?
Martijn Frazer@eniko I'm not convinced the problem is at the protocol level here. The problem is Google has way too much power. That's something that can and should be dealt with on a political level.
@Tijn never leave to politicians what you can fix yourself
@eniko Sure, but I think what's more helpful is curbing the power of Google by not using their products, rather than inventing a whole new platform which either doesn't take off, or if it does take off is just as open to attack from corporations as the current web is.
Farbs@eniko It's been done, just needs wider adoption (it's the pico8 cart browser)
@eniko http seems fine imo tbh, there's quirks, but it's useable enough. The issue is html, js and css imo
Ted Spence@eniko it’s not the protocol that is bad. It’s that there is no longer any incentive for people to share information without capitalism destroying whatever they create
aeva@eniko the real trick here would be making something that is repulsive to corporations, is accessible to people, and has a natural migration path to get people to use in in favor of regular webpages. I don't know what that would look like :/
@aeva me either to be honest 😔
@eniko Gemini enjoyers rise up
Scott Michaud@eniko No joke this is on my bucket list. A web browser is just a game engine with the worst scene format and scripting language imaginable. Very low hanging fruit if you're willing to donate your tech to an industry body.
Karyl 
@scottmichaud @eniko There’s gotta be something we could build that’s p2p or federated or something, failure and/or takeover resistant like AP is (in theory)
@paintedsky @eniko I'd like to think that web servers, themselves, are okay.
@scottmichaud you're not wrong
Popeye Otaku@eniko at least get rid of 90% of the cruft so you could actually write an interpreter for it, maybe some libraries for it to provide compatibility with current stuff?
Gorgeous na Shock!@eniko All the cool kids are hanging out in the Gopher tunnels.
bigb5wm@eniko We techinally have a bunch of new protocol for an alternative web. There is this one fediverse, nostra, TOR just to name a couple.
SaftyKuma@eniko HTTP is fine. Jury-rigging everything else under the sun to work under HTTP was what screwed things up.
Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; Soni L.@eniko this is what we're trying to do with web+ap: and draft-soni-protocol-handler-well-known-uri
the web is widely deployed, so it makes sense to use it as a fallback for new protocols.
Air Dinghy Interactive@eniko lets skip W3 and go to W4 please
@eniko Wait, so due to corporate licensing I can't telnet on port 80 any more? 🙀 Or openssl s_client… or nghttp2 as the case may be?
What's the angle to justify "dead end", here, given… open (IETF) standards? (Admittedly, HTTP/2 is based on SPDY from Google, but it **is** an IETF standard, now. As is HTTP/3 relying on QUIC for connection establishment; or lack thereof. A neat trick.)
@alice the web integrity thing Google is pushing and which they've already pushed into their codebase despite opposition that saw them having to lock basically all discussion down. If it's not this it's gonna be some other user hostile bullshit and eventually they're gonna ram it through and it'll become the most laughable "standard" ever devised. Better to just start over with a protocol that inherently protects users from big data and makes ad-driven models impossible
@eniko Problem is, Freenet has almost literally the worst UX I've ever experienced. But, it is distributed.
Discoverability is also a fundamental issue, given strict anonymity and its distributed nature. (Harkens back to the early days of Yahoo! as an almost literal directory index.)
Dang, now I'm sad. The first site my father hosted was a curated bookmark set. The novelty of the X-files theme MIDI will last until my grave, I hope.
:wipes away a tear:
Oh, those early days.
I vote for Gopher.
@eniko Problem is, if there's an inch of space, someone will find a way to monetize it. Ads are essentially inevitable and impossible to prevent.
At one point I saw someone selling individual pixels of an image. Groups would band together to purchase groups of pixels to actually draw something identifiable in the overall image.
> …it'll become the most laughable "standard" ever devised…
Sorry, had to come back and quip: so… like DeCSS? Or any other mechanism based on "secret numbers"? Such standards are never long for the world. They might zombie shuffle, but the inefficacy (my gods, that's a real word!) of the mechanism makes it instantly obsolete.
My father invented an Apple ][ disk copy protection mechanism in the shower which was broken in that month's Dr. Dobb's. Broken before it was used even once.
kouhai, of the health issues@eniko unfortunately, this is also what technochuds want. conservatism, reactionary simpler times, etc
so it’s uh, mixed