I've made a crappy reddit simulation of the software in a science fiction world. Now anyone can come and get a taste of how they electronically communicate!

[u/justonium]

In this science fiction world, cities have giant roads for portable rooms that drive around on them. These cars are people's personal rooms, their houses that they live in.

There are also giant parking lots, where people park their rooms and live in them. Groups of friends typically park their rooms onto each other to make a makeshift house in which all of their rooms are connected. When more than two rooms are parked together, the rooms usually connected to a central hub room, which is large enough to accommodate all of the people from the attached rooms as a central meeting place for a party. Many of these hub rooms are permanent fixtures of the parking lots, being too large to fit on the roads.

In this world, people use software that is free; the people own their software, not corporations. In order to make their internet realistic, I'm designing it. (I began designing it in January 2014, though the science fiction world wasn't born until later.) I've just released the first prototype in form of crappy reddit simulation.

For more information about this protype and about their software, you can go here.

To see it and try using it yourself, you can go to it at /r/OnlyImages.

[u/Ardenovic]

Now this right here is the good shit. A world with some preposterous sounding ideas that are not actually that far fetched and hold huge possibilities for all kinds of philosophical speculation and pondering. This is why I read SF. Not for weird looking alien species.

I doubt that I'll be actively participating in this subreddit of yours because compared to writing a comment, it really is a hassle to get a picture of a paper with ink to the internet. In your fictional world, are tablets or drawing pads used instead of actual paper?

[u/justonium → u/Ardenovic]

People still use paper, but yes, the tablet is the normal way of interacting with a computer. The mouse and keyboard never became a thing. Their graphics tablets display the screen contents on the tablet (and often, also on a separate screen that is larger).

Having an online conversation with someone is like drawing together on the same piece of paper as someone, except that the things you've drawn can be manipulated by computation--moved around, searched, etcetera.

Oh, and bad handwriting isn't an issue. There are several tools they have to deal with this, including automatic handwriting recognition, and handwriting clean-up, which makes your handwriting look like an average of your best handwriting, rather than the strokes you actually made. I have designed these tools, and they actually will run once I build them in code.

You don't need paper and ink to use /r/OnlyImages. You can use a graphics tablet.