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Poll HN: Would you use an anonymous web and forum?

1 points by uconnectlol ↗ HN
Imagine someone made a good web replacement like Freenet that's anonymous and P2P (and of course uncensorable). But it's fast and not written by script kiddies. Hypertext based but isn't buggy like the web. You open up an article and instantly get text, images, and videos, and can even right click and save them. Any content you post is seamlessly distributed across nodes as it gets more demand. All content is static and therefore the user interface is always consistent and fast.

Now at some point it has as much topic coverage as the web. And it has search indexes that allow you to find stuff of any topic, with filters with such categories as "non-commercial".

Would you use it?

Now imagine there is a forum program based on the same mechanisms: you just post the same kind of hypertext as your messages, and your posts themselves are distributed across nodes. Creating an "account" is just a cryptographic process. A forum topic is just a string instead a "community". You can talk about whatever you want, with zero moderation. You can use a filter to remove any category of posts you don't want to see (like spam, or Fortnite memes, or charlatans).

Just imagine it's like the web but without all the bugs from 30 years of cruft, and with these enhancements above, and is proven to work perfectly.

I would highly want this for publishing my articles on hacking and such, and for talking to people without having to appease a moderator. And for the ability to research arbitrary topics and get pages that just load instead of considering which country I'm in or showing popups.

What about you? Would you actually use it? Why or why not?

4 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 24.3 ms ] thread
jim-jim-jim
Everything you've described is good, but I wouldn't use it. Alternative protocols only attract people interested in alternative protocols. That's boring.
uconnectlol
No no, imagine it has all the topics you want at some point :D

> Now at some point it has as much topic coverage as the web

Damn , I should have said:

> Imagine it managed to take off, and decent amounts of people from all demographics are using it

anenefan
In my search over the years for a decentralised platform to host a forum, (mostly as host sites come and go, change plans etc) I didn't find anything that quite met my needs. Over the last couple of years I noted a few platforms that offer anonymous content which were good for blogs and echo chambers, but still not a fit for an interactive forum.

Getting away from decentralised p2p, yes there needs to be a new global web, a Simpleweb that is organised into various categories, each site host needing to use a tool to classify according to content, each static page, and identify dynamic pages, with the option of a static page being editable for x months after creation. Every so often I toy with all the various identifiers one would need to ensure that a person could search for a non spam, non banner site, no redirection content, (has their own file storage) and of a certain file type and get results that are entirely legal in their origin IP address.

viraptor
I feel like this could use a modified "so you've got an idea for fixing email" checklist. Some basic assumptions just don't hold:

> without having to appease a moderator (...) get pages that just load instead of considering which country I'm in or showing popups

Who's going to make this system work without country filtering or popups if you have an uncensorable network without moderators?

Are the creators going to go to court instead of me if local law does not agree with that idea?

> with filters with such categories as "non-commercial".

Again, who's going to ensure that's the case without moderators?

> Creating an "account" is just a cryptographic process.

So no account recovery then, making the service unusable for very-non-techy people.

> You open up an article and instantly get text, images, and videos,

Images and vidoes of ads - since the system is uncensorable, you can't stop it.