[Raion]

Such a community would have standards of HTML that are not unlike old standards used by very old browsers. I think Rich has some interesting ideas although I have yet to fully sit down and think about it. again I want to make sure that everything if I were to do this would be plain http, and have only a few entry points in the forms of search engines or otherwise. In order to keep normies out we would be boycotting Google and the like.

[drmadison]

I'm curious what all sites you imagine would pop up on this?

Obviously, as this is an IRIX-hobbyist network this is posted on, there's the retrocomputing fans. But what else would you expect to be created? Especially when you're talking by its very nature having it be insulated (or isolated). Furthermore, while I'm well aware of the dangers of the toxicity of the internet en-masse, being part of a self-selected echo chamber can also be dangerous.

I'm not specifically against the idea, I'd love to go back to the "better" early days of the web, when things were less commercial and more interest based. Doing so without having everything tracked by Google and Facebook and the others is even more appealing. I'm just curious what selection of useful / valuable information could be amassed with a small starting audience and limited discoverability. And would it be focused on informational content, or would entertaining content also be the goal in which case, from what sources?

[Raion]

I'm curious what all sites you imagine would pop up on this?

I would like to see a basic HTML encyclopedia site with most common topics covered
I want to see a bunch of geocities-like Web 1.0 era sites with pages
Forums and BBS type systems (maybe even a "chan" style site) that cover technology, news, video games, etc. Maybe other more mundane topics like home and garden, TV shows etc.
A drudge-report style news aggregator and scraper that reposts news articles as basic html/text.

And obviously, the purpose is to make it so you would have to actually seek it out. That would dissuade "normies" who go "eew old websites!" From there, we would have to trust each site that has community interaction to adopt reasonable standards for discourse that aren't politically or socially motivated. I hate sites like reddit because you either get the vaguely mainstream leftist-to-commie types, or in some small spaces you get like far right creepazoids and radical libertarians and such. You don't get any real acceptable discourse.

Obviously, as this is an IRIX-hobbyist network this is posted on, there's the retrocomputing fans. But what else would you expect to be created? Especially when you're talking by its very nature having it be insulated (or isolated). Furthermore, while I'm well aware of the dangers of the toxicity of the internet en-masse, being part of a self-selected echo chamber can also be dangerous.

I only really talked about this here because it's my site, I also know and care about a lot of the people on here on a personal level. Many of you I consider friends, and thus I feel that I would get more realistic discussion/progress/planning/criticism out of people who know me and my motivations moreso than strangers who have no understanding of what and how I act.

I'm not specifically against the idea, I'd love to go back to the "better" early days of the web, when things were less commercial and more interest based. Doing so without having everything tracked by Google and Facebook and the others is even more appealing. I'm just curious what selection of useful / valuable information could be amassed with a small starting audience and limited discoverability. And would it be focused on informational content, or would entertaining content also be the goal in which case, from what sources?

In particular, I would probably first get a plan of what a "soft launch" would include, then we would start a roadmap on it. In particular, I think a basic news aggregator/scraper, a few forums, and a sort of geocities type setup would be necessary for a "soft launch" But a basic HTML wikipedia wouldn't be impossible, especially as wikipedia offers downloads of its content in xml and other formats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:...XML_schema from there we just need a set of tools to parse and load that into a database.

Entertainment and such would also be welcome, i.e. a small scale early 2000s type video site (That both offers streams and download links to each video), authors and other types, and maybe even sites that offer other subculture stuff.

But the main "covenant" of these sites tying them all together would be:

1. Adherence to early HTML standards
2. Eschewing HTTPS of any kind (because SSL certs can be revoked for censorship)
3. Only search engines and link aggregations can be indexed by Google, Yandex, Bing, Baidu, DDG etc.
4. Late 90s/early 2000s style community guidelines, where the focus is on civility and discourse, not the toxicity of things like NeoGAF and RESETERA.

[drmadison]

Funnily enough, I went from reading this, to finding this article:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/d...wackiness/

Not quite the same full set of goals, but some similarities. Especially aroujnd escaping the algorithm focused drive most of the internet runs on. It's no longer about you going to what you want to see, but rather some algorithms decide what to show you, and we're supposed to trust it's unbiased and not manipulated...