In elaborate terms: you have the ability to change any one of the protocols, specifications, designs or standards of the above at their proposal stage or before their mass adoption. You may choose to modify or reject an existing one or create one by yourself.
Some users and I would have common ideas in mind, however I would love to see some esoteric ideas as well.
Given the ability, I’d get rid of the Internet completely.
Make it harder. Remove the gui. Require UNIX knowledge. Command line only.
Keep the mouth breathers out.
A very anti-“Eternal September” sentiment.
Think of all the AOL discs eliminated! 😉
This thread is mostly that, and then the one person like “127.0.0.1 is too tricky to remember”.
Full documentation and second sourcing of all hardware.
This restores the right of ownership and destroys the current dystopian nightmare world of lost citizenship and democracy. It is closely tied to google winning the right to digital slavery and the buying and selling of your digital person to exploit and manipulate you.
I think web 2.0 (ie. the internet after standards bodies had congealed around the browser stack of tech) would have been better off as a complete redesign. Sure we made SPAs work on top of the hodge-podge of shit that is HTML/CSS/JS, but at what cost? Before React and it’s ilk, there were many attempts to bring desktop GUI-like toolkits to the web which imo was a superior paradigm. Now, a browser is basically a shitty VM with horrible abstractions for web applications. If only we’d stopped and rethought that. WASM was also a chance for that to happen, but 1.0 is so limited (can’t challenge the browser too much! it makes google money!). And the fractured WASI nonsense that exists now means we’ll never get to the point where it could replace it.
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Hard to say, but we needed to leave a minimum level of a learning curve to using any computer, not a PHD required, but enough to bore the red hats. As soon as Apple’s toddlerfication of smashing BIG, bright, colorful, soft shapes made it so everyone in the world could gold the history of humanity’s knowledge in their pocket… They started confusing their pocket with their brains. Holding knowledge doesn’t mean HAVING knowledge.
The instant and infinite false confidence that magic slab gives hateful idiots was our downfall as a species.
I’d stop development of JavaScript.
Now VBScript would have likely become the default for Internet Explorer and would have likely won out.
And Microsoft would be in control of the web
I wonder if Gates would still go along the personality trajectory he’s had if he was even more powerful.
Oh man, I had completely forgotten about VBScript.
It could have been Python 🤷♂️ Imagine of Mosaic and Netscape had gone by that road.
Ban UDP. Illegalize the formation of UDP. I hate UDP. TCP is God’s transport layer protocol. Everything successful uses TCP. Minecraft, best selling game in the world? Guess what, TCP. UDP fans will really send their packet into the void praying for a response that will never arrive, for their packet was completely ignored by the receiver and will never see the light of day again until a stupid 60 second timeout. I Refuse to use udp. DNS? tcp only. HTTP/3 is disabled everywhere, as QUIC is an unholy bastard born from the wrath of UDP and the comparably great TCP. Even my VPN over wire guard (mullvad) uses the UDP over TCP bridge so that I am not required to come into physical contact with the hell that is UDP. I hate the stupid uncancellable timeouts that every software waits a full minute for, even though I know the request has failed. Everything that has failed uses UDP.
UDP has uses beyond internet and PCs. The embedded world makes extensive use of it.
God it’s all hopeless. It’s hopeless. I thought the “Reddit/Lemmy users can’t detect satire” was mostly a joke but it’s all too real
/s was invented for a reason.
We’re not dumb, it’s just that the internet is so full of incredibly crazy takes nobody can tell.
UDP is for video streams and other applications where a couple of dropped packets do not matter. Triple handshakes are kinda pointless for these types of data transfers.
Every packet is born equal. It is heresy how some people believe that some little packets, born with a certain task, are worth so little that we can just “drop” them. Imagine poor little Bobby packet #93736, on his school field trip, carrying a pixel of your stupid Microsoft teams meeting… but he gets lost in the crowd and left behind by the rest of the class.
Bobby Packet will never see his family again.
“Too much overhead”, they said. “It’s okay if we lose a few”. Billions of little packets are lost daily, forever, all because UDPcels believe in file packet supremacy, and that Bobby Packet “didn’t matter”.
TCP is proof of a loving God. In a TCP world, the teacher would do a head count… and figure out that Bobby Tables had gone missing. He would shout RETRANSMISSION! He would search ceaselessly just to find Bobby Packet again. And he will.
Gopher.
Or Gemini (protocol, not AI). No fancy rendering, you get plain text.
Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.
Stop IPv6 from existing.
Make IPv5, add a fifth number to the address, and improve NAT.
Not every particle in the universe needs a publicly routable address.
That’s interesting - I hadn’t heard too much dissatisfaction with IPv6 before, except for the slow adoption, and the not-as-nice looking addresses. Is it an aesthetic preference or just that IPv6 is overkill? Or any other advantages to doing it the “IPv5” way?
This is a pretty good takedown of IPv6 but I think the biggest problem with its adoption is the addresses. They look like gobbledygook just so we can give everything a public address and it made it a lot more fiddly to configure.
just so we can give everything a public address
Giving everything a public address was the original intent! NAT didn’t even exist prior to '94 and it was (and is) a massive kludge.
oh god, the nightmare that “adding a fifth number” would be
It would be less of a nightmare than changing all our addresses to add four more sets, be alphanumeric, and to change the separator.
The design team flew too close to the sun with that.
That’s not how ip addressing works.
it definitely would not.
Although not adopted, but ipv5 was mainly a proposal for streaming. https://itsfoss.com/what-happened-to-ipv5/
Upvoting, not because I necessarily agree but because its a good discussion.
IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn’t necessarily imply a
ninth chevronfifth octet.But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet.
I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system… although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.
there was already a proposed thing called ipv4+, and it’s completely insane. if you know anything about network infrastructure the entire chain is hilarious.
They weren’t thinking big enough. They’ve only doubled the address space. I say this at least half seriously, well aware that mine is far more ridiculous the other way.
… but I probably should have tried searching for “IPv4+” before using it as a generic term. At least one other proposal shows up when I search for that, and one of them is a proposal that adds a couple more octets.
They should make the next IP standard spin. Spinning is so much cooler than not spinning.
In the context of changing the course of things early on, I’d make everyone post under their real name in any context. To be clear, I DO NOT support that today. The cat’s already out of the bag and pseudonymous communities are the norm now, I don’t think we can unscramble that egg.
But if somehow, from day one, you needed to attach your own name to everything posted online, I feel like we’d have ended up with a less toxic internet than we have in many places today.
Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.
Making email free was a mistake. Makes sense to encourage early adoption but long term it’s been a no-lose proposition for spammers, phishing, and general aggressive marketing.
I’d argue the opposite. We need more things to be free and standardized. There is no universal way to send a file, store a file, send a text or picture message for example. Email, with a basic design that’s over 40 years old has had to fulfill all of that itself, and does so reasonable well, all things considered.
They say, on a free email-like service.TBF Lemmy might develop a spam problem yet, so that’s a little unfair. It really has to be per-message microtransactions to make a difference, though.
That’s what I was thinking. Just some minor amount to make senders do a cost benefit analysis.
I’ll just go with introducing IPv6 from the very start
I wonder what impact that would have had on early hardware because it would require more memory for the TCP stack
Can I get a ELI5 on why IPv6 is bad or not very good?
ipv4 is a 32-bit number, which means the total number of possible addresses are 232 = 4 294 967 296, which is waaaaay less than the amount of computers we have today. ipv6 is a 128-bit number, so the total is 2128 = 340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768 211 456, which is more than all the grains of sand on earth.
the only thing i’ve heard people don’t like about ipv6 is that the addresses are longer and have letters in them.
Minor correction: IPv6 uses 128bit addresses.
oops, yeah.
Thank you for the reply. That clears things up for me.
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yeah the frames are different but that doesn’t matter to 99.9% of people.
Funny: you say IPv6 from the beginning. Another commenter says no IPv6 at all.
This.
Everyone is directly connected to the network.
Everyone can host anything we want. No centralisation.
Trivial peer to peer.
A whole ecosystem of worms infesting every computer.
…
Wait, no, not that last one.
I tried a couple of times to understand how it works. I’m too dumb or my attention deficit is stronger than previously thought or all of the above.
That’s good one, a world where NAT never has to exist.
I’m not really that smart when it comes to protocols but I would go to Stanford University and guard the IT cabinet and tell Aaron Schwarz to stay the fuck out and go do something else.
