Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

It was originally hosted on Harvard's servers, and lasted only a few hours before the administration pulled the plug on facemash, which was basically a 'hot or not' clone.

Then they rented a server for $85/mo. and launched thefacebook.com a few weeks later.

Both sites were on the public internet.

https://www.fastcompany.com/59441/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-...

You could run it in a VM, which is equivalent to what your 20$ host is doing. Or you could run it on a separate machine. Or you can run it on the same machine which was common back in the day... if you use a reputable distro and apply updates regularly then it's really not a concern (i can't remember myself or anyone i know hacked through vulnerable packages, except for Worpress but that's precisely because it's not packaged by Debian).

> 20$ a month doesn't sound too bad

Doesn't it? I guess it's a matter of age and class and nationality. If you're too young to earn money, it's a barrier. If you're in the lower classes of your country, 20$/month can be a lot (that's like food for 30 days for one person). If you're in a "poor" country (i.e. neo-colony depleted of its resources by global north countries), 20$/month can even be considered a decent monthly income.

> buying a separate server

That's the thing. You usually don't have to buy it. It's old hardware lying around or that someone will donate for the purpose of running fun projects.

Yes, but some things become tricky:

- SMTP reputation is related with reverse DNS of your public IP

- reverse-proxying TLS-encrypted trafic relies on SNI headers, which not all protocols implement

- some protocols entirely don't have a virtualhost (domain) notion, like gopher or SSH

Overall, it's not so easy and simple. Sure i don't care that IoT devices don't have public addresses. To be honest, i'm firmly against IoT as a dystopian nightmare (good luck breaking into your home when your "smart lock" fails). However, public addresses and symmetric bandwidth are very important politically speaking, because they ensure that everyone is given equal opportunity to publish information.

Before the Internet, we had mostly asymmetrical communications. Newspaper required considerable resources to setup, and radio stations were (and still are) government-approved because there is limited channels available... so people could only consume information, not spread it. The Internet did away with this scarcity by having all IP addresses created equal, and everybody having as much upload than download speed (before xDSL).

Internet was the first network where everybody could create content and actually practice what some people call "freedom of speech" for a marginal cost. If you take away public IPs or introduce asymmetric bandwidth, it's not the Internet anymore: you are creating yet another passive consumption network where big corps and nation states tell you what to think.

I personally think asymmetric DSL is the worst that happened to the Internet so far. It's created the idea that there's different hardware and connectivity for clients (we the people), and for servers (fancy machines in datacenters)... two different classes of devices if you will. Nothing could be further from the truth, but this manipulation by the telco industry gave birth to the centralized hosting hellscape (GAFAM) that we know today.

But a decentralised way to do an internet search. So an anbiased/no tracking search engine

There was a time when the Internet was not divided between producers and consumers of content, but everyone was an equal netizen with publishing capabilities. Then came asymmetric connections, and datacenters, and the modern hellhole we all know to well.

It's never too late to act: many "community networks" are doing an amazing job to promote selfhosting and hosting cooperatives.