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

https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/im-building-parallel-internet-and-its.html
24•initramfs•2h ago

Comments

mjs06•1h 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•1h ago
by train. The internet train. :)
mjs06•1h ago
I'm waiting at the station. Tell me when you arrive.
milleramp•52m ago
Through a series of tubes.
blfr•1h 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•1h 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•54m ago
I mean can't get a more incestous tech cliche! There is a world out there too folks.
bigyabai•19m 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•15m ago
You're listening to WWSJD, the Los Altos FM station where Apple pilgrims tune in to the station that Steve Jobs did!
initramfs•43m ago
I get that, but a lot of design decisions today are 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.

sottol•50m 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.

Animats•45m 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•25m ago
gemini gave it the old college try
t0mas88•23m ago
Adblockers. On a lot of sites a significant portion of the bloat is from third party ads and tracking.
arjie•4m 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.
zokier•40m 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•29m 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 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
analogpixel•27m ago
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.pngs
13415•22m 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.
wmf•27m 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.
cyanydeez•6m ago
Also, steve jobs made utterly stupid decisions in a lot of areas. If you're trying to revolutionize something, try not to use someone who was clearly flawed in many aspects. Otherwise it sounds like you're just building a facade.
initramfs•24m ago
You have the right ideas, and there are protocols that do this, some more isolationist than others: https://yesterweb.org/zine/issue-05/08/ "The Web Outside the Net" and https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/SmolNet

Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html

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https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06-08-uk-surveillance-is-not-safety.pdf
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https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/im-building-parallel-internet-and-its.html
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