How can a group of volunteers build at least the tech for a replacement for the internet?
I was hoping that each individual user could run and maintain a piece of the infrastructure in a decentralized grassroots way.
How can users build a community owned and maintained replacement for the internet?
I hope that we can have our own servers and mesh/line/tower infrastructure and like wikipedia/internet-archive type organization and user donations based funding.
How could this be realized?
Can this be done with a custom made router that has a stronger wifi that can mesh with other’s of it’s kind? like a city wide mesh? or what are ways to do this?
Edit: this is not meant as a second dark web but more like geocities or the old internet with usermade websites
Replacing “the internet”? Not gonna happen.
Replacing the web (which is what you seem to mean)? Also not gonna happen but it’s at least imaginable.
Personally I’d prefer that we stop wasting our time on these silly utopian fantasies of “replacing” things and instead think about making them better. The World Wide Web, and everything it makes possible, is a treasure. It doesn’t need replacement, it needs improvement, and the improvement is absolutely happening already.
stop wasting our time on these silly utopian fantasies
Well bad actors from all walks of life’s do nothing else all day but waste their time on scary dystopian nightmares.
Maybe but that’s irrelevant. The question is how to improve things. I respect your idealism but I think that we’ll get much more progress by building on past achievements than by “replacing” them. Starting over always represents a giant penalty and so is almost always always a bad idea.
But sometimes whoever owns the infrastructure has you by the balls/ovaries and the only way to break free is to host everything yourself and own, run and maintain the infrastructure from a grassroots level.
Issues like net-neutrality stem from users not having control over the underlying systems.
The underlying system, if you mean the IP layer, is controlled by non-governmental organizations like ICANN. It’s already as open as any system can be in a world of nation states. If someone is censoring you then you can host in another more liberal jurisdiction, or even with a geopolitical enemy like Russia. Sure, your home jurisdiction could still block your site. But this is a problem of laws, it’s not something that has an easy technical fix. Same goes for net neutrality, which is a legal concept not a technical one.
The way to get a better internet is above all to vote for it and lobby for it. Boring but true.
If you want more user owned internet, make federalized services not just more popular, but easier to spin up and run. Lemmy is great, but I should be able to spin up an instance on my home server without much trouble. Give me the ability to run and manage peer tube on my own.
In my experience, “making a new one” never works.
What we can do is hack the old one. Go back to old protocols that work, undermine anything proprietary. Scrape fandomwiki to breezewiki, mod your discord client, make websites on neocities and nekoweb, use RSS to follow and email to comment. All the tools are there, leadership is the hard part.
Like ip2?
I2P
beautiful!
Can you help me understand this better? does this run atop the regular internet infrastructure?What is I2P?
The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is a fully encrypted private network layer. It protects your activity and location. Every day people use the network to connect with people without worry of being tracked or their data being collected. In some cases people rely on the network when they need to be discrete or are doing sensitive work.
I2P
Ask around in http://lemmy.world/c/i2p if you’re interested in I2P. Some resources also linked in the sidebar.
Maybe write up some instructions for volunteer operators to provide various components of an IP network. Some could provide user access points, some could provide long distance links, some can provide routing, and some can provide name resolution. No new tech is required, but it will be expensive.
All of this is already set up to work with low trust in the network itself on the Internet, so it’s definitely possible. There may even be good options for leasing long distance data lines that are currently unused.
Definitely check out Helium and MeshTastic. Neither are high speed data network s but similar in spirit.
Public infrastructure and taxes. Internet is handled by or function in a similar way to local libraries. Social media is replaced by locally run forums that use some kind of federated protocol for national connectivity potential. 99% of people don’t need global internet, private ISPs still exist but less people need global high speed connections so mostly businesses and important shit that needs to be off the public connections.
Mesh networking is a good way to get a functional enclave going. NYC is going hard on this right now. It’s built to be a on-ramp for the internet, but also hosts its own services.
The hard part is that suburbia (where I assume most lemmings are) is more or less built to make any kind of community, let alone a radio network, really hard to pull off. Urban areas have an outsized advantage due to population density and that most folks live multiple stories above ground; everyone is already in a tower. It’s not impossible in a flatter environment, just harder.
Long-distance links… well, I don’t have an answer. In theory people could pool their resources and get a few satellites up to do this. I suggest satellites since it’s way easier than the other models, although maybe fiber links are cheaper to lease these days? Either way, keeping that model going (maintenance, support, etc) would require cash-flow. Outside of something like Patreon, this would just reinvent the existing ISP model and should be approached with caution.
Basically the problem is that you want to connect to the world-wide-internet, but you to so you need an ISP or satellite data provider to act as a middle man so they have all the control over who gets to access the internet (by paying them a service fee). What it sounds like you want is a mesh network where each user communicates with other users directly. Instead of your computer connecting to an ISP through your router, you connect to other computers in a local area network typically through wifi or radio signals. Its a decentralized network that everyone owns a small piece of which they send and recieve data from eachother.
This technology has been around a very long time. Would you like to guess why its not popular or well known? Well, its slow and only useful in rural areas where you aren’t getting ISP service anyway. An intranet composed of 20 people connected in a few mile radius sharing usenet level information at download/upload speeds in the low kilobytes per second isn’t exactly what people think about or want when they think of the ‘internet’.
Perhaps a time will come where a consumer bought mesh based network router comes onto the market with enough advertising and appeal to be bought into by the masses with state/nation wide coverage built around a smallnet protocol like Gemini. Something like this almost happened with the Helium Network unfortunately it was designed to send smart IOT information in small packets and was only mass adopted because it was tied to mining crypto shitcoin through proof-of-connectivity. If someone can create something similar but without the shitcoin, with a mesh router box that host your website and is sold on the idea of a decentralized internet with a one-time purchase to cut out ISP it might just work.
a consumer bought mesh based network router
What specs would this fictional device likely have?
Look Into specs for helium miners for hardware and you’ll have a rough idea. The real question is software stack. How such a device would be interacted with from a user interface level, how would its version of webpages would work? I imagine its webpages would have to be text based with the option to download images or audio files as seperate files like the gemini protocol displayed as gemtext. Would consumers be willing to go back to early days web 1.0 style content like blogs and internet journals? You couldn’t use such a network connection for work or banking so thats another limitation.
Look into ham radio internet and mesh networks in general its not fiction its just never seen enough mass adoption in a easy to set up onsumer bought package thats successfully advertised and well distributed.
You mean Lemmy?
You want to know how people can make Lemmy?
Because anything more independent would require running physical infrastructure to peoples houses…
Like, you might be able to “wifi mesh” something together in cities, but it’ll never cover everything and that’s still technically using the existing network. Like, there’s no “free uncharted territory” left, it’s all owned by telecoms.
How could such a mesh work in large city?
What do you mean?
Mesh networks work like torrenting kind of, people need to set up a node, and hopefully enough people set up big enough ones they overlap, then everyone can talk to each other.
There’s a couple that do simple stuff like texts or calls/radio. But building a full fledged internet would take a lot more bandwidth, especially because if you want to interact from two different ends you don’t go straight to the other side, your info has to travel between each node on each overlap.
So people in the middle would be constantly passing traffic which may limit their bandwidth.
You can definitely go down the rabbit hole and find out about what exists, but in the process you’ll find out why we can’t do what you want to.
you cant. cause someone will have to own the hardware, to install it, to pay the bills and maintenence. So someone will always have critical control over some part or another.
and that wont go away until we become a Star Trek utopian society… and given the way things are in the world right now, we’re going in the exact opposite of that.
You mean, Like this?
