this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Well, back in the day you'd have a series of different services, usenet, irc, email, and for articles (at the time usually scholarly articles) you could use Gopher or follow certain usenet groups to find FTP sites hosting the docs.
So if we didn't have a unified web browser, and those technologies advanced at the pace of other similar services, here is how I see it:
Most services would be accessed by discrete apps, one for your email, one for your chat, one for your remote and local documents.
We wouldn't see the proliferation of siloed services, platforms like Facebook that offer all of these services but only within their subscribers. They just simply wouldn't be able to compete with the established services or add nuance or extra value.
Discord would also likely have come into existence a lot earlier and unified some of those services, but again if they chose to silo it as they are doing now, they wouldn't gain market dominance over already existing wide communities.
Without the profit incentive, existing services have no reason to tie their users to their platform or inhibit cross platform interactions.
Streaming services would still come into existence and fragment and silo like they are now, but that's only because of the cost of providing reliable HD video content isn't easily dispersed across unsiloed userbases.
Web advertisements would be non-existant but you'd still get spots in podcasts and videos.
Frankly I think it would be a better internet than what we have now.
This is probably a nice "What if" visualization comment I've read - at least this hypothetical timeline would have not tarnished under the enshittification as much as we have. But what about stuff like WebGL? Do we download binaries now and execute them in a sandbox, instead of downloading HTML, CSS, Webfonts and bunch of transpiled JS? What about internet cultures like e-sports, and streaming? How would we be viewing simple stuffs like blogs then? Perhaps, through a "blog" command line app, that reads the REST API JSON?
without browsers, I don't think there would be a need for most of that, as there would be no need to create the visually compelling but ultimately ridiculously overmoduled live documents.
Esports would still exist just like normal sports existed before the internet. Technically esports predates the world wide web as coin op competitions already existed and sometimes even made it into international news.
Again streaming sites would still exist as mentioned due to the high serving costs, and esports could easily be part of their lineup.
There is still place for documents on the internet without the WWW. back in the BBS days, we'd download text file magazines to read offline (lol sometimes having to save days and days of download credits just for a TEXT file! Man dialup was crazy. That said, without having to have one (kinda) standardized way to view documents those file formats would evolve beyond just text into something more like OpenOffice document formatting, again without the capitalism-driven effort to make snazzy, eyecatching but ultimately useless dynamically served document formats.
Honestly I think the dynamically served aspect of modern WWW documents is such a ridiculous waste of resources and bandwidth that not having it may just as well constitute a technical advancement over what we have today.