Making Internet Even More Accessible, An Open Business Idea For Students

Too many things are completely broken,
and almost everything is slow and over programmed.

Internet is meant to be a simple and useful thing,
the data is there but the user interface is not.

Project Gemini, Invidious, and Nitter
are good examples of the much needed simplification.

This business is similar,
but it requires a program on the local network.

It can be a Network Appliance, Virtual Machine on a Desktop Computer,
or a Raspberry PI (or similar SBC) plugged into the network.

The program will keep a mirror of sites the user configures,
so if internet connection is lost latest sync data will still be accessible.

Here every website would require a special plugin,
the main version of the site has to be downloaded.

And then data must be extracted from it,
and placed in a standard database.

Minimalist web server will then expose that data,
and allow multiple Graphic User Interface based Clients to browse it.

This is about as simple of a program as it gets,
but the GUI clients make an enormous difference.

A version meant for slow devices or simple browsers,
will work faster than what we see on standard desktop computers.

A version that pulls from database to create an RSS or ATOM feed,
will use existing software for the GUI, RSS Feed Readers.

To put it simply this is a program that converts internet,
to a database that runs on your own network.

You can then for example make a WIFI hotspot,
that only serves that version of the internet.

And go on a vacation,
where you can easy access your websites even without phone signal.

This makes a lot of sense in places where internet is expensive,
a $30 dollar Raspberry PI Zero for example can serve 2021 internet.

Unless the computer has a connection,
it won't be the latest version but still useful.

A person can take the little computer to a city,
get the latest website versions and take it back to the village.

Large companies aren't really able to provide such a service,
for one there is little money to be made here, as this is a free service.

And it maybe difficult for a company to be downloading 3rd party content,
but it is not a big deal at all if the computer is with the user.

Whether they access the website with this program, or a normal browser as expected,
it is technically the same thing, it is a client program.

There is more to it,
than just browsing latest news or posts.

I can imagine being able to sync databases,
between two clients not even needing an full internet connection.

And one can setup filters, or run a search,
or even configure alerts for when some keyword shows up.

The database structure is very simple,
and will perform even on an inexpensive computer.

Technologically this is slightly better than a feed reader,
because it captures the user conversations, on top of text and multimedia.

It still merges everything into a single database,
the difference between a post on Hacker News or YouTube, is just the source field.

When on a modern computer with full internet access,
the computer may schedule updates hourly.

This would eliminate most of the waiting for pages to load,
as the pages would be pre-fetched, and pre-generated.

Finally, the best way to look at this is as a internet caching device,
designed to speed up internet browsing, improve accessibility for handicapped users.

And make it available,
even when connection drops off.

Even when waking up to an internet outage in the morning,
one could still search for news about what was going on before it went out.

From a programming standpoint,
this is a great way to learn about developing internet software.

It touches upon issues like crawling links external to posts,
efficient storage, and scraping rendered web pages for data.

This is an open source project where multiple developers can contribute their ideas,
and it is given away free in the spirit of sharing, and making internet more open and accessible.