this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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It would only be mediated through more complex applications. We'd have open source apps like thunderbird for email, still, but most applications would be written by large companies who can afford that kind of ground-up software development.
All walled gardens, none of the democratization we've come to know. None of those tiny websites. No independent blogs except on closed services like substack and medium. No independent forums, just one central service that houses all of them... IE reddit. Maybe social media is even more centralized than it is now; maybe nobody manages to get a network monopoly in this world, and some communication standard pops up, a less good version of the fediverse, so I don't need five fucking apps, but the corporations still find a way to dominate that world.
Most importantly... The hyperlink is kind of dead. I can no longer click on an Associated Press article without an Associated Press app, or an app that knows how to read associated press apps. Maybe my RSS app has a feature like that built in, but if it does, it's bordering on browser territory. The same holds true for buying; I can't share a link to a niche brand's website because it doesn't have one, and you definitely don't have their app installed, so clothes need to be on amazon or nordstrom or not exist.
The fact that most people can't just click on a link to see what it is means that there are fewer references between some things and other things, the web is less connected.
This also ruins search. We can search Wikipedia, but we can't search the whole internet, because the internet doesn't have a unified format of references by which pagerank can operate, there are no websites to crawl, and the results you find each require you to download an app to interact with.
What does all of this mean? ... well, it really means that somebody would have eventually seen the need for a browser and invented it.
I think you've got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.
Now, the web is basically a giant funnel into six monolithic corporate controlled websites (ie. Walled gardens). Enshittification has ensued and the fun has ended.
I pine for the days when you would log on to BBSes to have genuine discussions about niche hobbies and topics. It didn't matter who you were as your only identity was your username; you could be whatever you wanted.
Now, the web is overflowing with millions of desperate, near identical 19 year olds shilling for BoredVPN while showing their arse cracks for fake internet points and sponsorship money.
Lemmy / Mastodon is the first platform in a VERY long time which has the same feeling as those early days and I really, really hope it sticks around.
This relied on web browsers. Without web browsers, it would be worse than it is now.
Do you know what a BBS is? Or Usenet?
Usenet was for geeks who didn't want a user interface getting between them and the raw text. It was never going to go mainstream, it was never going to be the internet.
I did not know that a terminal-BBS existed, but it sounds even worse than usenet. When I was a kid, people used the letters "bbs" to talk about web forums, generally. Those were websites. They were fine, but even they died out for a reason. The development and marketing of a web forum is not something that scales as well as the multi-forum technologies we have now โ reddit and reddit-style fediverse systems.
People didn't want to, and should not have wanted to, install a new app every time they wanted to try talking to new people, but they always did want a good user interface for the conversations they have.
So all of the current monolithic sites would notnexist without web browsers, and things would be far more decentralised
Big companies have enough money to develop and maintain dedicated applications for multiple platforms. Small and medium-sized services might be able to get one platform going, but they'd be lucky if they had any money left for marketing, or for developing new features, and would eventually either need to grow or accept obsolescence.
And again, I'm not going to develop a web application for my personal blog, and nobody's going to download it; I would need to use a centralized service.