Well, it seems there are two of us on the Internet. I do almost everything except browsing the web straight from the terminal.
> people knew about it from sheer novelty
This is a really good point. The essence of the question probably boils down to how many people like us there are out there, who want an alternative badly enough to work on it (and in it) while it's small and sparse. The only real feature I can think of that might seriously set it apart from today's net for everyone else is privacy protection, which could be built in from the ground up.
> the other net would be more interesting to just browse around and share stuff on.
What if that was the focus of the system? Make it super easy to publish and find Information. Webpages are honestly kind of hard to work with, and the tendency is to make them way too flashy. Remake the incentives of the system based on what was learned from the first version, and something really cool, and super useful, might be the result. I imagine that a terminal-interface focus might be instrumental.
> people knew about it from sheer novelty
This is a really good point. The essence of the question probably boils down to how many people like us there are out there, who want an alternative badly enough to work on it (and in it) while it's small and sparse. The only real feature I can think of that might seriously set it apart from today's net for everyone else is privacy protection, which could be built in from the ground up.