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The plain-text internet is coming

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Re: The plain-text internet is coming

#11

Post by a9h74j »

aendruk wrote: post #9
neurotrace wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out Gemini[1]. That's basically how it works. [1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Gemini sets a good example, but what I’m specifically advocating for is an incremental improvement to how we use the existing web. Fixing e.g. [1] (falling back to plaintext) should be trivial, and with that obstacle removed there would be nothing stopping early adopters from publishing in markdown today. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1319262

Perhaps advertise to the browser per se as plaintext, then have an extension look for a magic number or readable flag to indicate specific-markup-type, and translate from there more opportunistically.

Plaintext infrastructure; readable markup; optional (semi-automated?) styling from there.

(Perhaps your higher-up comment already suggests as much.)

Re: The plain-text internet is coming

#12

Post by gwern »

> He said that because the site is so simple and low-bandwidth, his Amazon CDN bill is only about $50 a month, and it’s mostly a fun side project anyway. Its success may change that, though: After recently hitting the front page of Hacker News and being featured on Daring Fireball, he said the site’s traffic went up 100x overnight, to about 100,000 homepage loads a day. (Those are all the analytics he has, because, again, simplicity.) Since then it’s dropped, but it’s still 10x what it was a few weeks ago. At some point, he might have to put an ad on the site. But it’d probably be plain text.

Is this another case of "this would cost <$5 on a dedicated box or non-cloud VPS, and you wouldn't even notice the load from spikes"? It's a pre-rendered text page (20KB as fully self-contained HTML archive) being served at all of 1 pageview per second. It does not cost $600/year to run such a thing in 2022.

Re: The plain-text internet is coming

#13

Post by ilaksh »

SahAssar wrote: post #8
ilaksh wrote: post #3

I think more things like the Gemini Protocol will continue to be popular. An internet that is deliberately severely bandwidth limited could make navigating between sites much faster. For example, a limit of 100K or even 1K per page for content, or something similar for web assembly applications/modules. Possibly combine that with entirely ditching JavaScript for web assembly and entirely separating applications from…

> I think more things like the Gemini Protocol will continue to be popular. Saying "continue" would mean that it is popular now, outside of a very small handful of niche sites I'd say gemini is not popular. I follow this space a bit and I basically only know of https://drewdevault.com/ that actually use it.

I was playing with it for awhile. Its not literally one person. But anyway the point was really not about Gemini being popular or not but just that general category would continue to be a thing.

Re: The plain-text internet is coming

#14

Post by wil421 »

gwern wrote: post #12

> He said that because the site is so simple and low-bandwidth, his Amazon CDN bill is only about $50 a month, and it’s mostly a fun side project anyway. Its success may change that, though: After recently hitting the front page of Hacker News and being featured on Daring Fireball, he said the site’s traffic went up 100x overnight, to about 100,000 homepage loads a day. (Those are all the analytics he has, because, a…

The extra $595 a year is paying someone else to run the infrastructure and security updates.

Re: The plain-text internet is coming

#15

Post by [deleted] »

ilaksh wrote: post #3

I think more things like the Gemini Protocol will continue to be popular. An internet that is deliberately severely bandwidth limited could make navigating between sites much faster. For example, a limit of 100K or even 1K per page for content, or something similar for web assembly applications/modules. Possibly combine that with entirely ditching JavaScript for web assembly and entirely separating applications from…

[deleted]

Re: The plain-text internet is coming

#16

Post by XCSme »

wil421 wrote: post #14
gwern wrote: post #12

> He said that because the site is so simple and low-bandwidth, his Amazon CDN bill is only about $50 a month, and it’s mostly a fun side project anyway. Its success may change that, though: After recently hitting the front page of Hacker News and being featured on Daring Fireball, he said the site’s traffic went up 100x overnight, to about 100,000 homepage loads a day. (Those are all the analytics he has, because, a…

The extra $595 a year is paying someone else to run the infrastructure and security updates.

Well, then go shared hosting, even cheaper, and they manage the infrastructure.

Re: The plain-text internet is coming

#17

Post by hinkley »

ilaksh wrote: post #3

I think more things like the Gemini Protocol will continue to be popular. An internet that is deliberately severely bandwidth limited could make navigating between sites much faster. For example, a limit of 100K or even 1K per page for content, or something similar for web assembly applications/modules. Possibly combine that with entirely ditching JavaScript for web assembly and entirely separating applications from…

Low bandwidth internet would also be very useful with mesh networking solutions, which will tend to have bottlenecks at the exit nodes.

Re: The plain-text internet is coming

#19

Post by gwern »

wil421 wrote: post #14
gwern wrote: post #12

> He said that because the site is so simple and low-bandwidth, his Amazon CDN bill is only about $50 a month, and it’s mostly a fun side project anyway. Its success may change that, though: After recently hitting the front page of Hacker News and being featured on Daring Fireball, he said the site’s traffic went up 100x overnight, to about 100,000 homepage loads a day. (Those are all the analytics he has, because, a…

The extra $595 a year is paying someone else to run the infrastructure and security updates.

When I pay Hetzner for an instance, what security infrastructure updates am I missing that is worth $595 a year? When I update the Linux OS and download the security patches, what am I missing compared to the AWS AMI of that very same Linux OS applying the same security patches? If I run a Debian AMI, is there a special supersekrit actually-secure Debian OS that Amazon gets but I don't?
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