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.
People would still have computers for office applications and games. Hardware would still get cheaper into the late 90s thanks to AMD nipping at Intel’s heels and assorted companies building IBM PC clones. Quake would still demonstrate netplay, and Unreal Tournament would still get a Mac port.
If nothing else, it’d come to computers via smartphones, which existed well before any of them had serious browsers. A global telecom network already existed. It was just voice-centric and mostly analog.
We’d have something similar. Maybe more fragmented like Usenet + telnet BBSes + gopher + IRC, or a closed standard like hypercard that you had to license. People want to communicate and put stuff out there to be heard, it’d have happened somehow.
It would only be mediated through more complex applications. We'd have open source apps like thunderbird for email, still, but most applications would be written by large companies who can afford that kind of ground-up software development.
All walled gardens, none of the democratization we've come to know. None of those tiny websites. No independent blogs except on closed services like substack and medium. No independent forums, just one central service that houses all of them... IE reddit. Maybe social media is even more centralized than it is now; maybe nobody manages to get a network monopoly in this world, and some communication standard pops up, a less good version of the fediverse, so I don't need five fucking apps, but the corporations still find a way to dominate that world.
Most importantly... The hyperlink is kind of dead. I can no longer click on an Associated Press article without an Associated Press app, or an app that knows how to read associated press apps. Maybe my RSS app has a feature like that built in, but if it does, it's bordering on browser territory. The same holds true for buying; I can't share a link to a niche brand's website because it doesn't have one, and you definitely don't have their app installed, so clothes need to be on amazon or nordstrom or not exist.
The fact that most people can't just click on a link to see what it is means that there are fewer references between some things and other things, the web is less connected.
This also ruins search. We can search Wikipedia, but we can't search the whole internet, because the internet doesn't have a unified format of references by which pagerank can operate, there are no websites to crawl, and the results you find each require you to download an app to interact with.
What does all of this mean? ... well, it really means that somebody would have eventually seen the need for a browser and invented it.
All walled gardens, none of the democratization we know now
I think you’ve got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.
Now, the web is basically a giant funnel into six monolithic corporate controlled websites (ie. Walled gardens). Enshittification has ensued and the fun has ended.
I pine for the days when you would log on to BBSes to have genuine discussions about niche hobbies and topics. It didn’t matter who you were as your only identity was your username; you could be whatever you wanted.
Now, the web is overflowing with millions of desperate, near identical 19 year olds shilling for BoredVPN while showing their arse cracks for fake internet points and sponsorship money.
Lemmy / Mastodon is the first platform in a VERY long time which has the same feeling as those early days and I really, really hope it sticks around.
I think you’ve got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.
This relied on web browsers. Without web browsers, it would be worse than it is now.
Usenet was for geeks who didn't want a user interface getting between them and the raw text. It was never going to go mainstream, it was never going to be the internet.
I did not know that a terminal-BBS existed, but it sounds even worse than usenet. When I was a kid, people used the letters "bbs" to talk about web forums, generally. Those were websites. They were fine, but even they died out for a reason. The development and marketing of a web forum is not something that scales as well as the multi-forum technologies we have now — reddit and reddit-style fediverse systems.
People didn't want to, and should not have wanted to, install a new app every time they wanted to try talking to new people, but they always did want a good user interface for the conversations they have.
Big companies have enough money to develop and maintain dedicated applications for multiple platforms. Small and medium-sized services might be able to get one platform going, but they'd be lucky if they had any money left for marketing, or for developing new features, and would eventually either need to grow or accept obsolescence.
And again, I'm not going to develop a web application for my personal blog, and nobody's going to download it; I would need to use a centralized service.
One of the things no one has talked about here are consumer content delivery services like AOL and Prodigy. These created some of the first Internet walled gardens, with programs created to serve these services’ content via phone lines. As consumers moved to broadband, I would expect these programs to become free and be the primary way for consumers to view content.
Before browsers even existed, there already was the internet. We had social media (NNTP and IRQ), online multi-user games (MUD, et al.), browsing (Gopher) and file hosting (FTP).
I was introduced to the web and the Arena browser with the words "It's just like Gopher, but with hypertext."
I was using the Internet before the WWW, and there was already a pretty good ecosystem from nerdy stuff to consumer-usable. Email, Usenet, Gopher, FTP, IRC, were all widely usable.
Gopher especially made a great way to index and search (with WAIS) things on multiple different services, without being a mess of text/hyperlinks/images/sound/video in a hairy ball like the WWW.
there were many ways to use the internet before browsers, applications talked with other applications, people joined BBSs, but you could argue that eventually, you’d like to access text or media in a repeatable manner, you’d like to be able to point to those resources in the least steps possible (some way of universally locate a resource…), those resources will end up being referenced by other resources and you’d eventually end up with the web.
Certainly many others would have tried to invent something like the web.
HyperCard predated the web browser and had the concept of easy to build pages that linked. Lots of people were working on ways to deliver apps over the Internet.
I think in some alternative timeline we’d still have a lot of interactive content on the Internet somewhat like the web, but probably based on different technology. Maybe more proprietary.
True. Thanks for the info about HyperCard. I just read up on the history of hypertext on wikipedia. And I didn’t know the exact history. I mean the question was, what if the WWW hadn’t been invented and not what if it was invented by somebody else and had a different name and architecture. So I didn’t include that in my answer. It’s certainly a product of its time. People were looking for a way to organize information and publish it on the internet. And Tim Berners-Lee didn’t come up with the whole concept of hypertext. Seems the concept was already there and libraries and people have been indexing and cross-referencing information before. It took someone to come up with the architecture and invent the markup language and the protocol. But it’s not that far fetched. It would probably have been done by somebody else if things had turned out differently.
I sometimes wonder how things were and felt back then. FTP is originally from 1971, TCP/IP was developed during the 70s and early 80s and they switched to the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) in 1983. SMTP (mail) was introduced in 1983, the NNTP (news) specification is from 1986, HTML was proposed in 1989 and the first browser being developed in late 1990, HTTP was introduced in 1991 and SSL was published in 1995. These are still around as of today (in revised, newer versions) and powering our world. There certainly also were precursors, competing and replaced technologies. So a lot of standardization happened especially during the 80s. In the early 1990 home(?) computers and storage got cheaper and more widespread (personal computers have been around since the 70s) and modems faster so more people could join the online services of that time. Other important tech of the early days that didn’t make it to today in their original form probably include UUCP, FidoNet, the whole dial-up BBSes and whatever ran on the ARPANET before the Internet Protocol got invented. But I suppose it was really different back then. Computer systems were big Unix machines and unaffordable to individuals. And a select few universities were connected, initially funded by the department of defense.
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