The simplicity of this site has got me thinking that it would be cool if every site was so simple and similar that you could reliably take the css file from one and use it in another. People would be swapping their general-use css files like they swap start pages. I think it could be done without stunting the page owners creativity by cleaning up some of the ugly ways of doing things and moving some css properties to html.

Paring down a lot of the visual clutter would be nice. The big social medias think they are doing this by simplifying the icons and buttons and stuff, but they do it in an aesthetically unpleasing way, while also adding a bunch of features no one needs or cares for.

i dont totally agree, i think theres a space for insane visual clutter and weird page layout, but it should mostly be on personal websites imo. the time cube website format should be normalized

my main one is a return to simplicity. there is way too much trying to reinvent the wheel just to say it happened. imo a lot sites now design themselves to look big and bloated. trying to find stuff feels like going through a maze. when it's someone's personal website it can be fun to get lost. when it's a business, social media, or a news site it's an eyesore and a waste of time.

What do u guys think of agoraroad? I think its fun but also a pain in the arse to read lol

>>5
i used to lurk it back in 2022. its alright! drained my laptop battery tho...

tbh i just wish less people used it. i dont know how id go about doing that but rn the main issue to me is that everyone uses it and so it gets capitalized on. if it were still niche then there would be far less of that
i would also make every website that's blue no longer blue because i hate that colour

>>5
Neat site. Has a lot personality with actual active forums. May not agree with every users on there. I would say nice site indeed.

>>1 I should have said, I meant changes to technology not culture, otherwise this will be a predictable circlejerk.

No direct downloads or streaming only torrents are allowed now

they should make that shit harder to use. cut the internet tubes and start over

>>10

You mean IPFS?

Making all identification illegal.

I think the problem is really just that you cannot unplug from the internet and it surround you wherever you go.
First step to a better internet would be taking phones out of it

Allow stuff. I hate places disallow legal stuff (violence, ideas, etc) so no one wants to host or have anything like that. For example political extremists are just driven to smaller echo chambers instead of being allowed with everyone else where their ideas could be debated and challenged. Free exchange of information is super important!

>>11
agree

most sites are internationally restricted and its so unnecessary, like i just want to compare the markets

B A N
J A V A
S C R I P T
! ! ! ! ! ! !

>>18

Together with WebAssembly

Give everyone free publicly-funded vritual private server webhosting

>>19

Together with PHP

>>19
Then how the fuck am I going to use this: https://copy.sh/v86/

>>23
use qemu the way god intended

>>23
tried messing with the 9front image. networking doesn't work by default instantly making it borderline useless (theoretically you may be able to get networking working, but you'd have to dig into man pages to do it, and even then i'm not sure it will, there's no 9fat partition, and rebooting is impossible, and when i noticed the next point i was disgusted).
mouse chording doesn't work at all making it 100% useless. mouse chording is using multiple mousebuttons at the same time to send different commands. This is highly important to the basic use of any plan9 system, to the point where to say "9front works" on this emulator is a flat out lie imo.
i'd rather it not exist than to give a false impression of 9front being as bad as it seems from the version copy.sh shows.

>>1
Gemini is kind of this. The sites (capsules in geminaut terminology) serve you gemtext which is akin to a stripped down markdown. Then you customize how things look in your gemini browser (or just read the plaintext).

Gemini is intended to be readable as plaintext though so there's very little styling available.

I've been saying we need a browser extention that reads the CSS for every page you visit and generates a compact, non-disgusting version that still retains basic layout, colour, and aesthetics. Should be doable with AI.

>>18
Web apps and the browser ecosystem are brilliant inventions in principle: I can make an app that is instantly usable on all internet-connected devices, for all OSes and architectures without any install faff required. However it sucks because of the compatability bs I have to go through to reach that point. Apart from that, it sucks how sites that should be static get developed like webapps, probably due to the developer's career incentive.

>>27
this might be the sort of thing you're after? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tranquility-1/

>>29
Ohhh, that seems pretty good! I asked on /wsr/ before, but nobody mentioned this.

well I tried it, and it's okay i guess. it doesn't respect the pragmatic or aesthetic parts of the page design. it oversizes icon images and makes everything the same colour.

>>18
Javascript isn't the problem, HTML5 is. There was a golden spot of Javascript in the late 2000s, where everything felt nice to click without being overtly intensive.

>>26
Gemini seems cool actually. It's sort of like really early web and Gopher. As long as it stays obscure, probably will be nice to use.

making a new anti-www from square one is far from a good way forward in my view. the information and userbase differentials mean that something like gemini could never take off short of all the www infrastructure getting blown up by terrorists. realistically, it has to be about gradually reappropriating the existing mass of protocols and human habits into what we always wanted them to be, step by step. but that requires much more ingenuity.

>>34
Make it late 90s era to anger normies but allowing for a decent amount of customization

https://github.com/face-hh/webx
Someone made this, so it's not impossible

>>35
so it's possible to make up your own web-like protocol. yay! however:
- nothing worthwhile can be accessed with it
- nothing worthwhile will ever be made accessible with it
- the install process is objectively painful and timewasting
- the whole thing is caked in embarrassing memes
what's this supposed to prove?

>>36
Yes, it sucks, but it proves you can make your own anti-www atleast

It proves that a protocol alone is worth nothing. Everything is in the human patterns of usage.

I wonder if you could make a BBS on Gemini. It looks like it has some degree of allowing for input, so maybe

>>39
Looks like people have already made Reddit inside of it.
gemini://bbs.geminispace.org

there's probably no technological way of fixing the issue, but just making pages like it's 1994, just one big vertical layout, would make things very easy to style with CSS in a generic way, and maybe you could promote a specific standard set of tags and attributes, have an expectation that the site will be usable and reasonably laid out without CSS and a validator to ensure that pages meet that spec in terms of tags/no JS/etc

if the whole "semantic web" idea was actually meaningfully adopted, where page content areas, headers, footers, menus, etc, etc are labeled in tags, you'd easily be able to just go and write generic CSS to style each part and move them around as you wish
modern CSS lets you do crazy stuff without a lick of JS anywhere too, you wouldn't be unduly stifled

>>15
Agree.
Ideas should run free.
But this is never going to happen as long as governments exist. But there's no alternative to governments.

Daily search limit with unlimited searches behind a monthly subscription.

Require some kind of relatively easy base technical barrier to entry for the web, as used to exist naturally, to filter for a minimum degree of nerd.
Smartphones ILLEGAL infinite scroll ILLEGAL copyright ILLEGAL intrusive advertising ILLEGAL insulting my waifu ILLEGAL javascript ILLEGAL llms ILLEGAL

I'd destroy it.

no more algorithms or engagement based monetization on social media style platforms (stuff like youtube insta twitter etc) and giving less power to search engines,search indexing, SEO

This isn't a change to the Internet, but sometimes I wish there was a quiet place where you can't get a signal, a like a public park. You could go there to relax and talk to people who are trying to also disconnect. Sometimes people invite me to their summer home and I kind of get this feeling, but with Starlink even the summer home has internet now.

Destroy the big platforms.

also ripping every single fucking person who has ever contributed or backed w3c into tiny tiny tiny chunks and then TAKING A FAT SHIT ON THEM I HATE W3C W3C IS THE ANTICHRIST

The majority of problems with the web today could be solved by banning algorithm-powered social media, and by banning short-form content.