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. 🕸️ References [1] [2]