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

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The 5-second version

  • The Thinnernet is a proposed parallel internet focused on minimal data transmission and reliable user experience rather than maximum bandwidth.
  • It prioritizes real-time deadlines and consistent delivery of application data, inspired by Steve Jobs's emphasis on user experience over raw hardware specs.
  • The concept addresses modern problems of network congestion, outages, and bloated data transfers that make services unreliable despite high-speed infrastructure.
  • It serves as a fallback infrastructure for scenarios where always-on, high-bandwidth connections fail or are unavailable.
  • The author began developing this concept in 2023, drawing from earlier work on Experience Base and TicketMS, and personal experience with slow connections and organizational resistance to workflow improvements.

Top voices

Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.

Animatsnotable163.6k karma3 comments
The trouble is, people keep extending Markdown to add HTML features. There's even Javascript embedded in Markdown.[1] You'd just create churn, not a fix. [1] https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html
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chrismorgannotable26.3k karma
And that concept was bonkers, proof conclusive that he had lost the plot—if his involvement with and endorsement of canvas-only Flutter wasn’t proof enough—and should be ignored completely until he comes to his senses. The obvious benchmark would be: can you implement an HTML/CSS/JS browser inside this environment and have it behave identically to the browser’s own HTML/CSS/JS? And the answer is: not a chance. WASM + WebGPU + ARIA + WebHID is simply not enough. Browsers provide a lot of functio…
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xg15notable22k karma
> Java and Flash struggle in all areas Worth noting that Flash did succeed: It was widely used across the web and installed by enough web users that sites could usually assume it was available (though it was considerate to provide fallback content) - that even though it needed a separate installation step! It took a conscious effort by browser vendors and Adobe to kill it and replace it with other technologies. Maybe for good reasons, but it was definitely not a "free market" development. I a…
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al_borland11.5k karma2 comments
A significant amount of the bloat on the modern internet is to facilitate marketing and advertisements, not for the benefit of the user. I often wonder if we see this downward spiral on sites, because their attempts to monetize increase their costs, which require them to increase monetization efforts, which increase… If we stripped it back, how much would some of these sites really need to run? Multimedia is inherently large, but there are a lot of diminishing returns as resolution and size i…
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