Show HN: Weft – an alternative internet with its own TCP-like
- URL: https://abouttime-d5a.pages.dev/project-weft
omeone said "let's make a new internet" — sarcastically. So I made a working one.
Not a metaphor, not a framework. weft is a small line-based protocol over raw TCP, with its own address scheme, its own markup, a terminal browser that speaks it, and an application-layer firewall you can drive in the browser. Three little servers link to each other to form a network. It's all pure Python standard library — zero dependencies — and the whole thing is a few hundred lines.
It will never scale to a billion users. That was the point.
The bet
The web we have is heavy. Every page drags a megabyte of JavaScript to show a paragraph of text, and something is always measuring you. weft is the opposite bet, and the whole design falls out of four rules:
text first, always
no client-side code, so there's no surveillance surface
a page is a file you can read with cat
the network is small enough to hold in your head
Here's what building each layer taught me.
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