Self explanatory title: A thread for any ideas or concepts that could lend themselves to a proper project but you're not sure how to develop yet.
One of the rules I have planned for this place is to keep threads focused on specific, concrete works-in-progress, but I think an exception for a thread like this should be fine.
I don't think it's controversial to say the mainstream web, as a vehicle for human conversation and cultivation, is, in 2025, a failure.
A concept Anthony has been bringing up often is Ivan Illich's idea of "Conviviality": Some technology is like an old car any Peruvian goat farmer can fix with enough wit and determination, others are like a Tesla that has to be brought into the dealer for any kind of maintenance; some are like the camera which anyone can use to create, others are like TV which can almost exclusively be used to consume. I haven't read Illich firsthand yet, hopefully I'm not doing the idea too much of a disservice. The web certainly began as the former, then due to centralization, monopolization of infrastructure like search engines, crass corporatism, increasing third world traffic, massively increased censorship, and the difficulty of creating alternatives to the mainstream, has become much more like the latter.
A particular failed solution I was thinking about the other way is the "Yesterweb": we could certainly call Neocities as a whole convivial, pure HTML/CSS is awkward to work with but not especially hard to learn--however the idea of the personal homepage doesn't really make sense given broader cultural changes since the turn of the millennium. Normal People Don't Exist Anymore, most of these websites are kind of struggling for a reason to exist. You kind of just get the Bluesky "talking into the void about buying bread" effect. The "Yesterweb" is ultimately reactionary phenomenon: in scope, in visual style, in userbase. In spite of the kitschy "Y2K" visuals everywhere, no is using Neocities to share email like it's 1999, these are just another platform to self-ghettoize through Discord with. That's probably the No.1 issue with personal homepages from which every other sort of reactionary failing is downstream of: These are "autistic" forms of communication, they're unable to communicate at all with eachother.
What else is there? There's also several, let's call them Neoreactionary attempts to replace the web through alternative protocols and technology like Urbit* or IPFS--that isn't categorically a bad approach but neither of these really offer something I'd care to use as a vehicle for conversation. Using crypto to allow people to get paid easily and bypass card-processor level censorship is good, at least.
In any case, I think a large part of the reason it's so difficult to make any alternatives to the mainstream web is because web development is simply awful. Technically, all a webserver has to do is transform incoming HTTP requests into outgoing HTML responses, but building anything interactive is incredibly tedious. There's dozens of "frameworks" to try and remedy that but none of them work right and force you into awkward conventions.
However I think you could actually make creating interactive websites as easy as making static websites using the ancient tech of CGI scripts in iframes. Some kind of standardized CGI "Manifest" file for the end-developer to just tie and style things together would probably be enough for to uplift most "personal websites" beyond just a blogposting void.
* Flick between any page of the Hoon documentation and any page of Unqualified Reservations sometime, it's very funny seeing Yarvin's mark so clearly right down to the design of the language itself.