Cyberdeck Week: A Smaller, Stranger Internet

What if cyberdecks could build a smaller, stranger internet?

I just had this idea. I don't have the technical background to know if it's feasible or not so I'm just going to describe it.

Let's imagine there are a thousand people with cyberdecks. Pretty low powered pieces that maybe can do some graphics but mostly text based. What if we could create text-based sites that live in our cyberdecks and you can visit them from your cyberdeck whenever they were available.

Maybe someone would run it only on weekdays (like my posing schedule here) or they run it in the evening or one day a week. Whatever the case may be. What if you need some kind of key or signature from your cyberdeck to access the rest of the cyberdecks? Something that would be difficult for high-powered machine to dupe. Is that possible?

There probably was something like this already or still is. I'm thinking BBS (bulletin board system)1 or P2P (peer-to-peer). One that was out the door by the time I was using a computer regularly and the other I've only used for media sharing. Actually, I you can just set a computer up as a webserver and run it. But can it simpler than that if what you're hosting is mostly text based materials?

What I'm thinking of is leaning into the stripped down nature of cyberdecks where the cyberdeck is the communication device, host, and and creation. Your deck page lives nowhere else so it becomes this very personal part of your online persona.

You create and post from there. No worries about banking info connected or anything sensitive like that. The pages are so small that you can run it via cellular carriers with little data. A small communicator with weird people. This digital world lives parallel to the larger internet. Kinda like a ham radio2.

I feel like I'm rambling but I also think I'm on to something possibly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory

Forgive me for not knowing too much about the technologies of the examples in this post. I know they exist and the cultural impact of them, but I have no clue how they work.