There is also gopher and USENET, but on cells it can be hard.

But the largest issue is the users attraction to "bright and shiny". I think no matter what comes I fear it will end up on the same path as now. Gemini has the ability to avoid enshitification, but it is still not attracting users like www.

Anyway alternatives exist but they need some TLC and a method to keep out commercial entities.

Yes there's technical challenges, but the current iteration of the clearnet is on life support from a humanistic perspective.

And, projects of similar conceptual scope already been accomplished. There exists more than one application layer network built on top of the current Internet.

If you want to criticize the idea I encourage you to; but please don't just shoot down and insult on hn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Basically, it’s a system that works at a scale where individuals can hold one another accountable. But not really beyond the Dunbar number, and certainly not at internet scale.

100 different, easy to integrate internets federated across a number of different communication technologies and protocols is actually very hard to regulate and capture.

Sure, you won't have another Facebook, but we children of the 70s, 80s,and 90s would ser value in that.

Like you would say who you think is credible and human. An algorithm would evaluate trust on your behalf and it would look to the people you trust, and then who they trust, and so on and assign scores to people. Distrust, or even other observations, could percolate in a similar way.

Then on social networks, or some sort of small-web, new users would need to find other people to vouch for them to establish trust. When viewing websites or social media posts the trust score of users could be shown alongside content, and used to filter feeds / visibility. A troll or bot could rather rapidly get picked up by a network of distrust so they could be filtered out quickly.

The algorithms and details of such a thing are fuzzy to me, and I think a lot of care and thought would be needed to try to ensure it doesn't collapse under subtle flaws with time.

That being said, the fact that the obvious attack vector goes completely unaddressed gives me pause.

If nobody else knows then they might not access, but I looked; at least some of the parts looks like interesting.

> The protocols in use here are quite nice and there's always Gemini if you want a protocol that is pure document oriented.

As well as others, depending on what you want to do; it is not quite as simple as "pure document oriented" (e.g. Gemini does have inputs (1x status code) and TLS as well, including authentication with client certificates).

> Perhaps a HTTP browser that only `Accept`s `text/markdown`

It might also be made to be modular so that the file formats and other features can be added separately (including HTTP, HTML, Unicode, etc also would not be forcibly built-in, and the different protocols, file formats, character sets, and other features can be done by adding them on (which can be static or dynamic; static might allow some possible optimizations but would require recompiling and/or relinking it when you want to change it)).

Why? Just eliminate surveillance.. no tracking is no money. There's another theory that maybe no money is no content, but that's sort of what tfa (and other stuff on HN lately) is actually talking about. Lots of people who would make content or just conversation for free are still relying on some sense of community which is under attack everywhere if not already destroyed. Community means organic discovery, organic participation, and some reasonable expectation of continuity / non-enshittification that's actually independent of corporate interests or sponsorship.