Chans have a big network effect, so even if you made a better one, that's not good enough for people to switch. It needs to be so much better that the features outweigh network effects. 8ch at the time had the significant benefit of having user-created boards, and thus a solution to mod abuse. And user confidence in 4ch was at a minimum because of GG. Even so, it's been how many years now and we still have only a fraction of activity.
I think a new chan would need to have a way of automatically copying content from bigger chans somehow. That way new boards could be bootstrapped with some borrowed content, so that they can have a hope of living. Otherwise it's just not worth it to participate in new, small boards long enough.
I made CLI program that watches threads for new replies and opens them in browser if needed. I was thinking of expanding it into a full-fledged browser, but if is doing it already no sense duplicating the work I guess.
But yeah a dedicated chan browser would be nice. The text replies on chans use very little data, the HTML and JS on top of that is a lot of bloat. Not to mention the JS is a privacy issue. Ideally the "chan" would just be a server with a well-defined data format (current JSON if cleaned up a bit would work) and something like a REST API that can
Then individual "chan browser" authors can handle actually rendering this stuff however they want as well as user interaction. In fact the mobile chan apps already do this, and it's a much better experience. Even more so now with how shit modern browsers are. The only "drawback" is that you won't be able to access the chan without the chan browser, but if for some reason you want tech impaired retards to participate in this model, a 3rd person can set up a web-based chan browser that takes data from the server and renders it in a browser. But crucially, UI and backend still won't have to be the responsibility of a single person or group.
