Trying to read the crystal ball of "next" keeps leaving me with a vast feeling of underfulfillment, that the attempts are almost always far too conservative. I have a hard time seeing most would-be competitors acknowledge just how flexible & powerful the web is.

Almost all new ambitions are decidedly lesser ambitions in many dimensions. The web is medium plus transport. Yet in the quest to reshape transport (a source of many limits of the web, what roots us the web in request/response client/server asymmetry), many protocols don't accommodate or consider the medium itself, or present significantly less. New protocols so often end up transporting lo-fi pure data, cutting free the malleable flexible self-modifying hypermedia canvas (the html + javascript + css trinity). They almost never expand the medium, make new connectivity possible within the page, or present a new rich self-running hypermedia alternative to the webpage.

Beaker Browser embraced DAT, which was notably one of the rare attempts that kept the web page itself intact, which made it far more featureful than many many would-be "next" upstarts!

I personally still struggled with understanding a post-page model though. Abstractly a p2p database on the page might constitute it's comment section, but how we can built co-interactive systems, how the original post might expand to link/encompass newly added comment entities for example, was still a sticky point about "what are resources" that I remained somewhat unclear on in DAT. The transport semi-seamlessly pulled together content, but the model of resources never gel'ed for me like it did for my understanding of the web; it's "expansion of the medium" & "new connectivity' were not as seamlessly usable as the web's native http transports.

For sure, there's lots of good reason to listen to those who advocate for doing less. They'll almost certainly come up with some interesting data-points, interesting modes from the pioneers away from broad & flexible hypermedia. Even systems like RSS or- more-so- ActivityPub can somewhat be classified in this camp: a regularization of data, of protocols, a step away from general & malleable media towards a transport for specific style-less activities. There's hypermedia systems that just espouse lo-fi, such as Gemini, which I personally am not very excited for but which I hope form stable communities, become a practice we can look at.

Personally I think there's a lot of mileage left for the web, that the web itself might be heading towards a point where radically different things start happening. WebRTC- with hope- seems semi-fated to gain some QUIC transports, at which point we can potentially think much more intensely about multiple streams of data or connection being open between clients. There's still no client-side address scheme visible, but one could emerge & we could try to make it tenable across host origins/authorities, over time, hopefully. I'm getting way into the future, but systems like WebBundles/WebPackage crossed with the more client-ful experience suggest client-authored content bundled, that might be authorable potentially offline, then relayed over potentially-local p2p networks. The webpage can itself be an extremely potent navigator of many pieces of web content, and I believe we have only started exploring how much agency we can give users, only started exploring how interconnected a single page might be. And I tend to think what emerges here will constitute a "next" web, even living in-part inside & being hostable from within the current web. And I think it'll be a long time before the crystal ball gazing starts having anything that looks like a possibly well-defined destination; it's still all very early.