For me, social media clients already act as a kind of browser. Theoretically, if all sides on the web would be connected to ActivityPub, you could access the whole web over a social web client. There exist bridges to the semantic web and of course (regardless of whether this is positive or negative) you also have bots connecting the social web to AI.

Well, the idea is to overcome the computer-age someday. I have the feeling that we are already moving in this kind of direction with different web paradigms being implemented currently:

The semantic web data would already be there: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

i’m no longer sure if you’re envisioning a web browser or a website builder. your terminology is all over the place.

I’s blurring the line in-between. It’s trying to set the interaction with the web on a lower level that is closer to the data. It’s like you are live-coding the website you want to use for a specific use-case. But then just call the high-level API-endpoints right away. Basically making the dev-tools and the dev-console of browsers the main way to interact with the web (which assumes a web that is build in a similar fashion).

and no, the semantic web is in no way an an open, global codebase. it’s just a way of structuring html. i know berners-lee wanted the web to be more like what you are describing but the web we have today is not that. you’d need a new protocol.

Yeah, that’s true :(

I don’t know. Basically, if you already know what you want, maybe you only want to type down a couple of statements (maybe even from a template or a tutorial that you found online), modify some stuff and then hit enter. And maybe this modifying of language could be the “browsing” part of the browser.

If you look at it like this it would also be immediate and precise. You would only need to add very good code completion tools, e.g. when you click on a noun, you see all the attributes it has in your ontology. Much like in a IDE. There you also “browse” the space of all potential programs with the interface of language with code completion for keywords and defined concepts, which act like links in traditional browsers.

In contrast, the semantic web is like a open, global code base, where everybody can contribute to. And traditional browser could not successfully implement a language interface because the code base had no defined semantic, this would be possible for the semantic web. And using LLMs, it could be propagated into other web paradigms.

there are already text-based browsers like qutebrowser

hypercard

Awesome! Thanks for the references, didn’t know there were already some applications in this direction

Right, but the interface is only one part of the program (which has already been implemented in practice). Another part is the precision controller.

"

Basically with an app like ChatGPT, you have before you a black box that you can send commands to and that gives you unpredictable answers and consumes huge amounts of energy.

Instead, the semantc web browser with the precision controller starts with a complete white box, where you can control the ontology, have full control of the language, the outcome and consumes much less energy; but you can move on the ratio towards a ChatGPT-like black box with the precision controller.

With the default level, the ACE-syntax is enforced very strictly and semantic web data is expected to have the same syntax as defined. With a lower precision level, an LLM is stuck inbetween, syntax is not enforced as strictly and the ontology is enforced even if the data does not match it, also propagating to other web pradigms like MCP/AI-web and traditional web-services with REST-APIs.

The precision controller basically let’s the user move between a very strict semantic web browser and the lose cannon of a ChatGPT+MCP-app. And I think this moving of ratio is only possible if you start developing a strict semantic web browser, which has a precision controller integrated.

Another merit is that the energy consumption can be adjusted at will. If money/energy is low, for example in a state’s administration, the semantic web browser can still be used, while ChatGPT-like apps become unfeasible. "

It does use LLMs with the precision controller - which determines the degree to which ontologies are applied to not-semantic-web-data. This is done with LLMs as translation tools if the precision controller is adjusted with a low precision degree (ergo more fuzziness, ergo more LLMs).

But yeah, it’s basically meant as a contra-approach to ChatGPT-like apps, giving users back control. And because rule-based systems have always failed in the past, LLMs are used if the user wants to make the app more fuzzy and access more data this way.

Would be cool to have a link on the original blog. I totally missed that the whole thing moved. But great project in general.

I think it can very well be applied to the Threadiverse.

• Sin #1: The First-Move Problem - Doesn’t really applies for the Threadiverse, because the instances (at least for me) do feel genuinely different, with a different culture, etc., which is one of the most exciting things for me here
• Sin #2: Navigation Inconsistency - Basically the same here.
• Sin #3: Remote Interaction Hell - Also the same here, right?
• Sin #4: Private Mentions Aren’t Really DM’s - Same here, right?
• Sin #5: The Phantom Social Graph - There definitely are synchronization issues on Lemmy, too (see the australian instance, which, I think has a latency of a week of so per post :D). Otherwise because the Threadiverse is still rather small, it seems to work mostly fine.
• Sin #6: The Discovery Problem - Much better on Lemmy. The algorithms are both transparent and make the threadiverse feel alive even though it has much less user.
• Sin #7: Basically doesn’t apply here, because you don’t follow users, but can be applied for communities. And multiple of the same communities on different instances are a big problem of the Threadiverse. Also abandoned communities. PyFed solves this with topics and Lemmy also has an upcoming feature for this in v1.0 I think.

I think the most pressing issue is sin#7 if applied to communities.

In an abstract sense, I see the Threadiverse as inversion of Mastodon: instead of posting messages to a personal account, which tags may be interesting to you to discover other similar content, in the Threadiverse, users post to hashtags and who posted them is only secondary important to you, but may be used to discover more content by the same account.

Cool. Well, the feedback until now was rather lukewarm. But that’s fine, I’m now going more in a P2P-direction. It would be cool to have a way for everybody to participate in the training of big AI models in case HuggingFace enshittifies

Yeah thats a good point. Also given that nodes could be fairly far apart from one another, this could become a serious problem.

Currently the nodes only recommend music (and are not really good at it tbh). But theoretically, it could be all kinds of machine learning problems (then again, there is the issue with scaling and quality of the training results).

Good point

Yeah, the whole thing was a bit low-effort. Next post will be more professional.

It was just a demo. But when I develop it further, it will be either a client or a whole instance-configurator (hopefully).

Its similar to what the muni-town/weird-people tried to do, but this time with language.

Thanks :) I guess I shouldn’t have linked it to vibe coding.