Hello world

Hello! My name is Shaun. I go by sploders101 online, and have had this website for a while, but haven't done much with it publicly since middle school. However, I have loads of interesting projects & ideas, and really enjoy teaching and sharing what I'm working on, so here goes...

A bit about me

I have been programming since age 10 when I decided that digital electronics wasn't really my thing, but I wanted something in the same realm. I started with FreeBASIC tutorials on YouTube, and gradually learned the principles of programming over time. At some point, I started checking out "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Website" from the library... every... single... week...

I was young and sucked at reading (and still do), and the book was almost 3 inches thick. I don't believe I ever read the whole thing, but as I skipped through, I learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Perl. My dad set up an Apache HTTP server under his desk and gave me this domain which he registered on Godaddy back when they had charmingly-cringy ads and a logo that looked like this:

I was over the moon when he did this, and largely attribute that moment as the primary jumpstart to my future career. To a roughly 13-year-old kid like me who was obsessed with technology, this was about the coolest thing I could possibly have. I seized the opportunity to put my own pages up and showed them to all my friends.

I learned some Perl, but honestly, it didn't make a lot of sense to me. I just did some basic things like echoing text and reading and writing files.

As I grew up, I started using Linux on and off, building my own PCs from the best parts of all my neighbors' old PCs whenever they upgraded. I was never much of a designer or a speaker though, so this website was largely unused for anything more than tinkering and gaining understanding.

Early Internet Culture

I unfortunately grew up towards the end of what I would consider the "early internet". However, I got just enough of it to now feel nostalgic for it in this day and age of centralized social media services, conformance, technical illiteracy, and censorship.

I miss the era when things were weird. I miss browsing the internet and discovering small communities of people who gathered around a central idea, whether it be software development, games, or anything else. I remember making friendships on the internet that actually lasted a surprisingly long time despite not knowing much of anything about them personally. I miss "random website" links, little JavaScript games, personal blogs, and creative experiments in design...

And I want to bring that back.

Resurrecting a bygone era

So how do we do this? I don't think we can go back to the way it was before, nor would we necessarily want to. Technology has come a long way, and there's a lot of evil in it, but there's a lot of good, too. What if we can bring forward into today a slice of what made the web great then?

I think first we need to identify what it is we're missing:

• Individuality
• Ownership over people's personal online spaces
• Small communities
• Open standards (HTTP, RSS readers, IRC chat, Jabber)
• Lower consequence to individual expression or security incidents

Looking at this list, a few ideas come to mind.

Medium-effort publishing

I think the first step towards this goal is medium-effort publishing. Creating a website is hard, and because of that, most people won't do so. Most content management systems are way too hard to manage. They have so many options, plugins, insane defaults that leave your system open to attackers, and WAY too much surface area for malicious parties to exploit. They often feel slow, and/or have overly complicated editing interfaces that feel like MS Word when most people would be fine with TextEdit.

On the other side of this problem, platforms like Twitter and X are too easy. They are designed to limit the ability to express a full thought, and promote the idea that everyone should just share their intrusive, contextless thoughts with no filter. I think this is a major contributor to the society we see today, where naunce is borderline incomprehensible to the general public, and it's always either one way or the other.

I think we need a sweet spot. We need something that feels more like public journaling than dumbing our ideas down or writing an essay. I think Markdown is a fantastic medium for this. It has just enough syntax to express the vast majority of formatting that people want, but is minimal enough to learn in an afternoon. It gets out of your way and just lets you write, making it a perfect building block in crafting a solution.

Open Standards

These still exist. They never went away. In fact, they've improved over time. We now have protocols like Atom, OAuth/OIDC, and ActivityPub that allow reading content from any application, aggregating content, subscribing to sources you like, and authenticating in a decentralized manner. We just need to use them.

On top of that, some people enjoy living in the terminal. Terminals have always been fairly capable, and are especially so today. I don't personally like having to leave my terminal to browse the web... What if we could resurrect the bulletin-board system using newer standards like SSH and Telnet? I think this could be really cool, and could open up some really cool possibilities. I could even design a protocol for browsing and hyperlinking between interactive systems in the terminal, like HTML (which actually stands for HyperText Markup Language), but specifically designed for terminal users.

Portable Online Identities

I need to research ActivityPub more because I know it has some version of this already, but I think we need to have a concept of portable online identities. I think that we should have the ability to post messages on other people's platforms while retaining ownership of our own accounts, rather than being at the mercy of random webmasters' understanding of cybersecurity. I think one major reason people use "Sign in with Google" everywhere is because they don't want to manage so many accounts and risk losing any of them. It's much easier to protect one account than it is 300 of them. OpenID Connect already provides these facilities. It is essentially OAuth2, which is what that "Log in with Google" already uses, but abstracted to allow platforms to host "discovery endpoints" which make the configuration much easier and more portable. While OIDC may not work in practice for decentralized authentication, I don't think it would take much to take the concepts and build something more suitable for such a use case.

Online Third Spaces

Once we have portable identities, I think we should create portable third spaces capable of using these identities. People would be able to bring the account they created on their own website over to any other website to interact with its users. This lowers the risk of signing up for accounts on websites maintained by individuals. We could also create a browser extension for verifying cryptographic signatures on messages in order to make sure they are authentic. This would prevent administrators of third party sites from modifying your messages to say something you didn't say. With this safety would come trust, and with trust, users will be free to roam online third spaces as they please with little risk. This would allow us to facilitate the creation of small, focused communities rallying around a central topic.

Warding Off Bots and Spam

One problem that I imagine will occur is bots and spam. While I don't have a solution for this that I love, I think a good first step is proof-of-work captchas and various forms of filtration. I think the lowest-hanging fruit is an LLM judge using low-power local models. This could surface questionable posts for moderation and block spam. However, I believe these tools are also part of the problem, so care should be taken during implementation, and these tools will be optional. I'm open to other ideas as well.

Conclusion (and Solution)

I think there's some actionable ideas in here that could help to bring back the culture of the old internet in the modern era, and I'd like to do something about it, starting with this website. The first step to decentralizing the internet is to make a website, so I'm finally doing something public with mine.

As part of this effort, I am building what I have decided to call:

Temporally Ambiguous CMS - TACMS for short.

This is the CMS that powers my site. I will be designing it for myself first, but will be architecting the code so it can be abstracted once I have something I'm happy with. This will be a dead-simple CMS that avoids JavaScript for core functionality and provides the open standards discussed above:

Let's see where this goes. If you're interested in helping out, have ideas for solving the technical challenges presented, or have input on concepts that made the old internet culture great, shoot me an email at [email protected].