Y’know how Discord is an application that only does one website?
That.
It’d look like that.
Outside the web, even in this timeline, there’s been no shortage of internet-centric programs. Napster would still emerge, leading to Limewire and BitTorrent. Streaming services like Netflix would probably exist, but only if video-streaming applications like RealPlayer took off. There’s little reason Youtube could not have worked as a glorified file server. You’d show up and need to install some video client to do anything, but that’s not really different from how everyone had to install Flash.
Even leading into the dot-com boom - Prodigy, CompuServe, and early AOL were walled gardens. You could use services those programs provided, or, you could dial in and then run Quake. People were buying computers and getting modems to use instant messaging and e-mail as much as to browse webrings or use a search engine.
IRC would be huge. Comments here predicting no competition are severely overlooking that decentralized chat protocol, and how people to-this-day form weird little communities. Hell, they’re more centralized now, thanks to the aforementioned Discord.
And in this application-centric internet - games would be a lot cooler, a lot sooner. Flash was a forward-looking godsend for about three years, back when it was mostly Shockwave. Once games demanded 3D hardware and even iMacs had it, the explosion of webgames was still rigidly 2D. Ultimate Doom was a “look what your browser can do now!” demo in 2000, 2004, and 2008… using technology from late 1992. When some maniac ported Quake 2 to browsers, he had to use Java.
Without browsers, there’d be nothing weird about being asked to download an executable and run it. It could be as fancy and modern as the developers liked. Obviously it could also be a virus that makes you reinstall Windows 98 for the fifth time this year, but Flash was damn near as vulnerable as that, and you’d never catch that virus from a friggin’ banner ad inviting you to punch a monkey.
The wrong-est take in this thread is expecting open-source ultranerds to wither. Nah: we’d be the ones pushing the biggest formats, by coagulating similar services into one place. The Fediverse is trying to staple together a Reddit clone, a Tumblr clone, and a Twitter clone. You don’t think we’d meld all the Wiki apps together? Or unify whatever here’s-some-text services people host, the way instant messaging protocols were swallowed by Pidgin? We’d recreate the browser by accident. Not as a starry-eyed Hypercard clone or a jumped-up document viewer, but as a way to run code in a sandbox without having to explicitly install it. Java instead of Javascript. Jesus Christ how horrifying.
Yeah pretty much. Two major differences: not motivated by surveillance, and not pushed when you try using a normal website. There are no websites.
You’d also be running multiple services at once, the way people will leave a torrent client, IM client, and IRC client open. Or at least idle in the system tray. Not sure if the constant sound effects are more or less of a vortex antipattern than persistent notifications.
Y’know how Discord is an application that only does one website?
That.
It’d look like that.
Outside the web, even in this timeline, there’s been no shortage of internet-centric programs. Napster would still emerge, leading to Limewire and BitTorrent. Streaming services like Netflix would probably exist, but only if video-streaming applications like RealPlayer took off. There’s little reason Youtube could not have worked as a glorified file server. You’d show up and need to install some video client to do anything, but that’s not really different from how everyone had to install Flash.
Even leading into the dot-com boom - Prodigy, CompuServe, and early AOL were walled gardens. You could use services those programs provided, or, you could dial in and then run Quake. People were buying computers and getting modems to use instant messaging and e-mail as much as to browse webrings or use a search engine.
IRC would be huge. Comments here predicting no competition are severely overlooking that decentralized chat protocol, and how people to-this-day form weird little communities. Hell, they’re more centralized now, thanks to the aforementioned Discord.
And in this application-centric internet - games would be a lot cooler, a lot sooner. Flash was a forward-looking godsend for about three years, back when it was mostly Shockwave. Once games demanded 3D hardware and even iMacs had it, the explosion of webgames was still rigidly 2D. Ultimate Doom was a “look what your browser can do now!” demo in 2000, 2004, and 2008… using technology from late 1992. When some maniac ported Quake 2 to browsers, he had to use Java.
Without browsers, there’d be nothing weird about being asked to download an executable and run it. It could be as fancy and modern as the developers liked. Obviously it could also be a virus that makes you reinstall Windows 98 for the fifth time this year, but Flash was damn near as vulnerable as that, and you’d never catch that virus from a friggin’ banner ad inviting you to punch a monkey.
The wrong-est take in this thread is expecting open-source ultranerds to wither. Nah: we’d be the ones pushing the biggest formats, by coagulating similar services into one place. The Fediverse is trying to staple together a Reddit clone, a Tumblr clone, and a Twitter clone. You don’t think we’d meld all the Wiki apps together? Or unify whatever here’s-some-text services people host, the way instant messaging protocols were swallowed by Pidgin? We’d recreate the browser by accident. Not as a starry-eyed Hypercard clone or a jumped-up document viewer, but as a way to run code in a sandbox without having to explicitly install it. Java instead of Javascript. Jesus Christ how horrifying.
So basically what websites on mobile are pushing for by trying to force users to download their stupid apps.
Yeah pretty much. Two major differences: not motivated by surveillance, and not pushed when you try using a normal website. There are no websites.
You’d also be running multiple services at once, the way people will leave a torrent client, IM client, and IRC client open. Or at least idle in the system tray. Not sure if the constant sound effects are more or less of a vortex antipattern than persistent notifications.