The idea came up in another thread a while back.
Copy the principle behind IRC/Matrix. Instead of webshit, you separate the frontend from the imageboard. Make a client that connects to user-run servers, and requests common data such as threads/posts/announcement/etc. The server should also be easy to set up, if kids can click minecraft_serber.exe to run their minecraft servers, imageboards can do the same to let anyone instantly host their own board without technical knowhow or installing gentoo. It would be able to store servers/boards in your favorites, so you can easily switch between them seamlessly without having to remember addresses or anything. A javashit web interface could be created as well to mimic old imageboards being on the browser.
Advantages
- impossible for the server to track anything more than your IP, since the client is on your computer and thus the server can't shove scripts or cookies at you nor receive browser fingerprints or anything. Also since boards are on various servers nobody can know you go to /zoo/ except for the owner of that board itself.
- decentralization makes it impossible to censor or shut down since people can easily run their own servers with their own rules, and nobody else can do shit about it.
- simpler/faster server architecture is possible since it doesn't need to render HTML pages at all, and can more intelligently request information (as opposed to loading everything every pageview).
- much more customizable than some shitty webpage that comes as a fixed html document with a bunch of unnamed elements all over in awkward configurations and is inconsistent between pages and possibly changes periodically. Yes I'm looking at 8chan right now.
- possibly more interesting features since it's a desktop program, for example opening files in your own programs (e.g. videos in MPCHC) without having to "download" it, or you could add your reaction image folder in the settings and it'll show files from it automatically when you add an image. Maybe you could give it a folder and it'll post all the files in it one by one.
Disadvantages
- board naming and linking to them is harder. Instead of typing just >>>/tech/, you'd have to type >>>8ch.net/tech/ or something, which will get much more annoying if the server doesn't have a neat and short URL like that. Also you can't just say "/v/ is shit" or "/prog/ is better" since you can't tell which server is being referred to.
- hard to embed things like youtube since it requires a web browser system.
- maybe harder to add a cloudflare botnet. I don't know how that kind of thing works but you could probably add 2 server "modes", the normal one lets the client request anything however it wants, and the second one only serves fixed JSON "pages" that can then be cached by cloudflare or whatever.
- harder to make custom styles unless the client uses some esoteric UI system. Simple color swaps could be easy though.
- features will be limited to the user's client and the server owner can't really change it. For example if the client didn't display announcements on the page, there's no way for the server owner to make them appear. It's fine if the client attempts to support everything imaginable though.