@s_hentzschel @mcc @kapsiR The open web and internet existed before invasive ad spam and subsequent rot.

The vast majority of what information I consume could be distributed on BBSes, Fidonet and Usenet without any problem.

Bandcamp could be replaced by a Usenet hierarchy with artists (verification would involve some cryptographic signing, presumably) posting magnet links to their music with a few tags and GNU Taler wallets (for pay as you want model, because banks for some reason never properly standardized anything usable by arbitrary clients). They could additionally post the music to some sibling .binaries group for the actual music files.

Much of Youtube could be replaced by the same.

Usenet and NetNews in general supports MIME types, so formats to facilitate unambiguous indexing could be used too.

And so promptly I've replaced 60% of what most of my family members use the internet for with something that doesn't even require a constant connection (downloading requires such access, but everything else other than GNU Taler transactions can be done offline), is distributed at its core (except the GNU Taler payment, that requires a direct connection to the exchange registering the transactions) and which access to was provided by ISPs.

Note that in this case I only limited myself to technologies that already exist. It's possible to improve on them, and it's possible to create new ones too. But we already have what we need for a Free and social network.