Ask Lemmy

Hmmm, I got a few ideas, not necessarily to make a "better now".

One is for Unix's initial development to only begin in the mid 1980s, instead of the 1970s, which would hopefully result in some of its more obnoxious "features" not existing. rm -rf / - No asking for confirmation, because that will certainly not have any undesired consequences! The main downside is that we wouldn't have the Unix-Haters Handbook

Another is making RISC style CPUs the default for desktop computers, whether the originals by Acorn or even with Intel deciding to make their own ARM x86 series all the way back in the 80s. I'd pick this one.

The internet would be free, operated and maintained by the postal service.

Forums and YouTube remain the main forms of social media. No Facebook or anything of the like.

Here's an esoteric one: Kill the internet (as we know it) before it begins.

Okay, hear me out. Internetworking existed before HTTP and websites, and once the system of routing was there it was inevitable it would be used for all the things it is today. Email came first, and what is the Fediverse but an automated, abstracted-from-the-user email system?

With no HTTP, somebody comes up with the idea of an application that formats your mailing lists into one navigable page, and then somebody else starts caching mailing list emails at the server until requested by a user (like an instance). SMTP directly transitions into ActivityPub, and there's no need to build platforms overtop which can be monopolised. We might get to skip the Zuckerbergs and surveillance capitalism entirely.

I'm not really that smart when it comes to protocols but I would go to Stanford University and guard the IT cabinet and tell Aaron Schwarz to stay the fuck out and go do something else.

Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.

Regulatory: Ban advertising.

All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.

Hard to say, but we needed to leave a minimum level of a learning curve to using any computer, not a PHD required, but enough to bore the red hats. As soon as Apple's toddlerfication of smashing BIG, bright, colorful, soft shapes made it so everyone in the world could gold the history of humanity's knowledge in their pocket... They started confusing their pocket with their brains. Holding knowledge doesn't mean HAVING knowledge.

The instant and infinite false confidence that magic slab gives hateful idiots was our downfall as a species.

Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.

Full documentation and second sourcing of all hardware.

This restores the right of ownership and destroys the current dystopian nightmare world of lost citizenship and democracy. It is closely tied to google winning the right to digital slavery and the buying and selling of your digital person to exploit and manipulate you.

Ban UDP. Illegalize the formation of UDP. I hate UDP. TCP is God's transport layer protocol. Everything successful uses TCP. Minecraft, best selling game in the world? Guess what, TCP. UDP fans will really send their packet into the void praying for a response that will never arrive, for their packet was completely ignored by the receiver and will never see the light of day again until a stupid 60 second timeout. I Refuse to use udp. DNS? tcp only. HTTP/3 is disabled everywhere, as QUIC is an unholy bastard born from the wrath of UDP and the comparably great TCP. Even my VPN over wire guard (mullvad) uses the UDP over TCP bridge so that I am not required to come into physical contact with the hell that is UDP. I hate the stupid uncancellable timeouts that every software waits a full minute for, even though I know the request has failed. Everything that has failed uses UDP.

This one will be super controversial, but I'd say get rid of mobile internet. I think it was a huge turning point for society, and not in a good way.

It's tough because it actually does a lot of really good, useful things. But it also has a ton of negative effects. We seemed to do ok before it, and cell phones would still function as phones for calls and texting.

I'd make the internet automatically fact check everything

I'd stop development of JavaScript.

Stop IPv6 from existing.

Make IPv5, add a fifth number to the address, and improve NAT.

Not every particle in the universe needs a publicly routable address.

European computer builders joining MSX and expanding it to 16 and 32 bits.

I'd like to know how things would've turned out if they hadn't made the decision to start allowing commercial traffic on the Internet.

IDK how I'd do it, but I'd absolutely try to find a way to ensure Amiga wins out compared to windows worldwide.

Either that, or, if legal, making a very vague patent/trademark/whatever on things like tracking pixels/cookies and implementing them on a dummy site for a "totally not a patent/trademark/whatever hold" type site to at least ensure privacy is at least a little better for the average person not using chrome, edge, Firefox, etcetera.

One? Tie between redoing CFAA, DMCA, and privacy regulations before they became problems.