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Katipo is a minimal alternative internet with a Vulkan based browser

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I’m nervous, announcing this, as it isn’t ready to ship out to the general public yet, and I haven’t had any feedback at all from anyone, I’m out on my own here. I think this concept itself is kind of dismissed outright a lot too, and I understand why, I wouldn’t believe me either actually.But, I do believe this is very much worth your time to check out, I am not aware of anything else very much like it.I won’t repeat what is already written on the github README here, but some info:I am a successful semi-retired solo game developer, I have been making my own bespoke game engines since 2003 for all of my games across a number of platforms and languages. Last year, I ripped out the engine of my latest game, and stripped it back with the goal to start a new project, as I have done a number of times before.But this time, I decided to ditch lua and make my own programming language, and that was sort of the tipping point. Once I thought about multiplayer, and realized I wanted a general purpose network that didn't exist, I was on my way down this extremely deep rabbit hole.I want to just make a few things clear, then I hope that some of you might have some questions or feedback.- I'm disillusioned by capitalism and the AI transition, and that influences my motives- I have made all of this open source and free not because I am overly altruistic, but because it is the only way something like this can succeed- I don’t think it can or should replace the internet, I see it as a cycleway alternative to the internet highway, they have different purposes- I have no real desire to run an open source project or lead anyone, I mostly just want software that works for me and my family and friends. I love coding and I like to make nice things and share them.- There is still a lot to do, I'm very excited about messaging and the whole client-side data thing in particular, but for now there are only a few weeks of work to go until a bare bones browser will be functional enough to release and ship.You can have a play and build it all yourself though right now, host sites, and build apps.

HN · launched Feb 16, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views

Niche: decentralized protocols and service platforms · 53 launches, 3 in the last 7 days ▼ -73% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Creating an alternative internet network stack coupled with a custom Vulkan-based web rendering engine requires rare, high-level graphics and systems engineering skills.

What it would actually take: The project necessitates a custom networking protocol/daemon alongside a ground-up graphics rendering pipeline built in C/C++/Rust using the Vulkan API for GPU rasterization, text layout, and DOM-like parsing. Building rendering engines that interface with raw GPU drivers demands deep graphics engineering, memory management, and systems design expertise that LLMs cannot reliably synthesize without human oversight.

Discussion

3 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Big Tech DNS gatekeepers blocking access

Feature requests: Use UDP instead of current protocol

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 317 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #300 of 318 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 110 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.