No, I have not tried that. But I might now. :)

I’ve got a Thinkpad 600X (Pentium III, 256MB RAM). I put Debian 12 on it, and the OS is not quite small enough. (NetBSD couldn’t drive my particular CardBus Wifi card, sadly, and 9front couldn’t drive the NeoMagic video properly.) Just Emacs on the console, no X, and eww for web browsing (to your question) and elpher for poking around Gemini. I’m not familiar enough with Thinkpads to know if that’s a useful data point for you.

Nobody’s mentioned https://www.haiku-os.org/ yet, so I will. I can’t remember what happened with it on my Thinkpad. There are several graphical browsers there, with a range of capabilities, as well as a port of Emacs.

I guess my real answer is: don’t handle today’s internet with all of its heavy websites? Use the web for documents, and use native applications rather than web apps for other purposes, such as chatting and email.

I would pull on that thread. That is, in your shoes

Directions unclear; shoelaces tangled

Secure Scuttlebutt is (was?) a protocol for high-latency communication between occasionally-networked humans. Pro: https://scuttlebutt.nz/; con (not read in detail): https://derctuo.github.io/notes/secure-scuttlebutt.html. I think it was supposed to be able to spread messages over Bluetooth, assuming a sufficiently connected web of nodes between person A and person B. Public keys were identities, and were bound to devices; unfortunately people may have multiple devices, or change devices over time, so this was a hindrance.

IPFS was supposed to be the Interplanetary File System. I think that was just because whatever pieces of content you ask for, you also cache, as part of the design: you keep a copy on the near side of the small high-latency pipe. But that’s mostly about file transfer, not interactivity.

UUCP was definitely made in a time where a latency of days for delivery of email or netnews was common.

In the early days of CGI, the Web was just one way people imagined interacting with applications; another way was email. RFC 3834 has some recommendations for people who are going to automate email responses. There used to be services you could email a URL to, and receive the web page back as an email.

Using ed (in my experience) involves looking up the screen, or up the roll of paper on your teletype, to see what the lines of your file were, and imagine what they are now, given the changes you’ve wrought to them since they were printed, and then turn them into what they should be. With Mars rovers you have a simulation that you issue your command to, before sending it off to Mars. With correspondence chess you might keep a physical chessboard for each game you have going, and/or send a form back and forth that keeps track of several moves.

People used to do computation at universities and businesses by writing programs at their desks, submitting them to be typed on punchcards, and receiving printouts some time later. They would “desk check” their programs before sending them in, because each compute job took a couple days to come back.

I mention all these because, in an extreme censorship environment, any local state (session history on paper, an app on a smartphone, an odd device) might not be good to have around. So usability may require reducing the total amount of state that a command carries. The current working directory at the time a command is run changes the meaning and outcome of the command; you may not remember that directory in a day or two. The vocabulary and syntax of command-line switches are easy to look up in online manuals - but are there offline manuals? I don’t know if this avenue of inquiry helps you, but it’s interesting to think about for a moment.