Document: WM-078                                                 P. Webb
Category: Life                                                2025-12-23

Planning and implementing the Neue Internet

Abstract

Accidentally discovering that my disparate ideas have a unified theme

Body

It appears that what I’ve been obsessed with for several years, the
idea of a "Neue Internet," is what I’ve been unintentionally building
towards. High-level: social network, domain registry/registrar,
payments, code hosting, video, operating systems, and hardware. In
other words, if the internet was invented in 2026, what would it look
like? What’s the infrastructure?

Ideas are free, so I have no problem sharing them (especially when I
already have the best domains for them, hehe). Execution
is everything.

With that said, here’s what I envision:

1. Payments

The RFC (7231)[1] for the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" code was
"published" June 2014, more than a decade ago at the time of this
writing. The word published is in quotes because the section for
it just says "The 402 (Payment Required) status code is reserved
for future use" (it was introduced in January 1997 in
RFC 2068[2]). Cloudflare and Coinbase recently teamed up to
release primitives for HTTP 402 based on crypto coins called x402.
Bitcoin (Lightning) also has a version of this called L402.
There’s an opportunity for someone to abstract these into a single
API to make accepting payments easy; kinda like the crypto version
of Stripe (without the hidden requirement/mandate that one is
forced to use hosted iframes to process money; this is for PCI
compliance, lest you wish to fill out a 100+ page document that
absolves them of any fraudulent activity occurring from you using
their raw API instead).

This project will live at neue.cash.

2. Social (Part I)

Back in 2016 I became increasingly aware of social media making
people angry and irritable. With hindsight, we know that other
countries were intentionally sowing discord amongst us and
profiting from it (fear and anger is fantastic for engagement and
increased engagement = money). Cool. This was also the era where
news outlets couldn’t get enough of the term "filter bubble" and I
decided that maybe filter bubbles are good. After all, I prefer to
talk to a large handful of people across different spaces…when
there’s too many voices, things tend to get ugly; that’s when I
discovered Dunbar’s Number. In essence, a guy surmised that most
people only ever truly know roughly 150 people in their lifetime.
What if you had a social media platform where every group had a
150 person limit? They’d essentially be a bunch of self-contained
forums. I took that idea, added Myspace’s top friends feature, and
started prototyping my social network. I had a decent beta but I
eventually realized that REST fucking sucks for relational data
retrieval so I shut it down while I learned GraphQL and start over
from scratch. I got distracted by a blockchain project for half a
decade and by the time I got back my social media platform,
Bluesky and Mastodon existed. I lost steam to work on a closed
platform while these open platforms were doing a decent job.

This project lived at socii.network.

3. Identity

My blockchain distraction was a DNS alt-root that launched late
2019. 15 years earlier, I was a high-school kid who frequently
skipped lunch to do research on the library computers (and
participate in DJing, music production, and Megaman Battle Network
forums). A random Ask Jeeves moment led to discovering what a TLD
was, ICANN, and the price to apply for a new TLD. I filed this
information in the back of my mind as a future dream. Well,
Handshake (the blockchain project) was the realization of a dream
I thought I’d never get the chance of achieving; creating TLDs and
building infrastructure for people to build cool shit and host
sites on dope domains!

I’m aware just how nerdy that sounds, and you’re right to assume I
didn’t get laid in high-school.

My time working on Handshake projects ended due to infighting,
greed, and more infighting. I sold my TLD portfolio, open sourced
code, and archived plenty of blog posts to help future builders. I
got so close to that dream and I refuse to let it die, so I’m
working on a better implementation, IMHO, called "Dap." It
addresses the primary technical complaints of Handshake (pre-mine
and squatters), increases security (Blake3 Proof-of-Work), and
massively reduces energy consumption compared to most blockchains
(Verifiable Delay and Verifiable Random Functions). You want and
need a solid foundation for the Neue Internet, after all.

This project lives at dap.sh.

4. Code Hosting

Github is owned by Microsoft and Microsoft supports AI replacing
humans, ICE, and war criminals. It’s not difficult to understand
why I’d want an alternative. Even before Microsoft spent a $7.5
billion on acquiring Github, I dabbled in self-hosting my code and
using other services. I don’t like any of them. Bitbucket is a
joke, Radicle is cool af but confusing (how tf do you do private
repos?), RhodeCode is old, cgit is too limited, Gitlab is too
bulky and power-hungry, Gitea is difficult to customize, and the
rest of them are just Github clones with lackluster design. For
me, simply being an alternative isn’t enough.

I mocked up a repo UI in SvelteKit and refined it over a few
weeks. I’m pleased with the design direction and the new
terminology I created for this next-generation code forge. Looking
forward to getting it into production so I can move my code to it
and keep Github as my bookmark manager for useful repos.

This project will live at eol.sh.

5. Video (Social, Part II)

Man, video is hard. Especially when THE place to upload video is a
Google product; YouTube. Ugh.

I love YouTube, I use it literally every day. Am I logged in?
Absolutely not. I’m only logged into Google for clients that use
it and even then, I am only logged in using Brave browser. That’s
all I use said browser for. Thankfully, YouTube employs "shadow
profiles," which essentially learns from my watch habits to
algorithmically curate a selection of content to watch. I’m also
subscribed to several creators via RSS (I’m surprised Google
hasn’t yoinked that capability out of YouTube yet).

With that said, I felt gross about being logged in to Google while
in my main browser and uploading my gaming clips. I dreaded doing
it so much that I just wouldn’t upload at all. Then I read a blog
post on Hacker News where someone claimed they saved millions (or
thousands, I forget) of dollars on video storage fees by using
Cloudflare R2. That piqued my interest so I asked Claude how to
programmatically use ffmpeg to create video playlists at varying
resolutions. I turned that into an API, tested it on a few videos,
and decided to make a new video platform.

Competing with YouTube (and Google) is a waste of time; they throw
away amounts of money that’d change my life, on an hourly basis.
Nah, a free platform is not sustainable, ESPECIALLY if it’s
involving video. I think I have a winning solution:
subscription-based video platform where videos are capped at 5
seconds or 5 minutes. Supporters can tip Creators, Creators take
home 85% (highest in the industry), everyone’s happy. I’m spending
2026 proving my thesis that this can become profitable. I’m also
taking some of my favorite ideas from my social network and
applying them here.

This project lives at nickel.video.

6. OS & Hardware

"Liquid Ass" is what people are calling Apple’s Windows Vista
moment. Embarrassing. The guy who led the ass design just left to
work at Facebook. Microsoft literally puts ads into Windows and is
increasingly antagonistic with their customers. An aggressive
operating system is crazy in this age of AI. Good grief. Oh, and
Apple is also experimenting with ads in the OS. I’ve long resisted
uttering the phrase, "This wouldn’t happen if Steve Jobs was still
alive," but man, it’s true. The Apple I fell in love with had
taste and poise (mostly). I will say that Apple hardware is
fucking phenomenal, no one has them beat on that front (I did send
back my year-old M2 Mac Studio because my M1 MacBook Pro is still
chugging along quite well).

Meanwhile, Linux is having a fantastic year. Framework and MNT
Reform laptops are beloved and Valve’s upcoming gaming PC is an
internet darling. I think they proven that modular computing can
and will be profitable. This is the best time for Apple to
resurrect the Jonathan Computer, a modular marvel envisioned under
their roof in the mid-1980s. Current leadership would never do it
(I believe Phil Schiller would entertain the idea), so I intend to
sherlock them…in about 30 years or less. Hardware is hard and
what I lack in resources and recourse, I make up for in vision and
sheer force of will.

The "desktop" paradigm we’ve used since modern computing’s
inception is tired. We compute on several devices with differing
form factors daily, either for work or leisure. We also interface
with remote systems and generate so much data, most of which is
governed on such systems. Technology has advanced enough for
local-first software to be the norm, not some niche feature for
nerds. "Oh noes, people will be confused, we have to save them
from themselves!!" Treat people with respect and teach them. If
you can’t/won’t do that, move aside. Better yet, close this tab
and angrily talk about me to your friend group, I need my legend
to grow.

The project lives at systemsoft.works.

I left out email and messaging and that’s because I don’t yet have a
compelling vision for either. I think JMAP is a solid improvement
over IMAP but also feel like it could be better. For messaging, I
just want a modern cross-platform Miranda IM. Or better yet, why not
combine the two? Email is just long-form messaging, right? A nicely
designed Delta Chat client would probably be enough for me tbh.

Most of my ideas start within the confines of legacy constraints
until I realize (or remember) that innovation lives outside the
confines of existing infrastructures and norms. You don’t need
permission to change the world, you can just…do it. Impossible is
not a word, it’s an excuse. 🕸️