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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else working on alternatives to this web? We're going to want something working before this one becomes a telescreen.

I'm thinking:

- content addressing, not server addressing (to better distribute the hosting load)

- looser coupling between data itself and apps for viewing data (to prevent aesthetics from being used as a heuristic for trustworthiness)

- a native permissionless annotation protocol (p2p trust governs whether annotations appear: if you see an ad, just revoke trust in its author)

- no code execution needed for browsing, fancy features (i.e. the kind of thing you actually need js for) stay optional

I'm curious what design goals other people think are relevant.

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I’ve put barely any thought into it but I think a “localnet” would be better. Your usage is entirely based on calculated geoposition and the userbase is segmented into regions based on user count. More than X0,000 users in any one region and it splits to keep things small. This would be a limitation for hosting content. If you want to send a message out to another person in a different region you’d have to make a deliberate effort to do so and it will be private such as a letter would be.

Idk if that would achieve my goals and honestly I can’t plainly state what my goals are. All I know is I get tired of privileged California snobs telling me how things should be in my back 40

I've had similar thoughts. I've been sketching out a design where you can tag data with a location (a restaurant menu, say, which is only needed near the restaurant). Suppose the data is being gossiped between mobile devices. Some process which understands the user's past (and estimated future) movements can decide when the data can be forgotten.

Plus--as I imagine it--users would be able to trust each other in certain domains, so which fragments your device hangs on to is going to depend on who you trust and what you're interested in.

Hopefully, these combined would mean that whatever part of the web is relevant to your location is also the part of it that's already cached on your device or on a nearby one.

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