Ask Lemmy

You could do something like that using point-to-point wireless links or just cables slung between buildings to connect boxes running a self-organizing mesh network protocol like yggdrasil. But there are too many challenges for me to go into depth here ranging from getting buy in from enough people who are located in close proximity, managing user expectations of speed, making services available over such an overlay network (or managing and paying for proxies that provide access to the regular Internet), dealing with geography, etc.

You'd basically be looking at replicating freifunk or nycmesh or doing something along those lines. NYCmesh as I can tell operates more like an ISP so I would expect it to be at least harder than what they do.

Imo time is better invested in developing and advancing decentralized applications and protocols, such as developing stuff using bittorrent/DHT or I2P which can just take advantage of the existing internet.

Protocols and decentralization are a good step.

Why would you want to replace the internet at a technical level, which is what the post appears to be focused on?

There's plenty of arguments to burn-it-down at a social level, but building a second technical implementation doesn't get you around those. Having individuals own more of the core doesn't do much when the network level itself is largely neutral to the content that passes through it.

Also the core of the internet is built around big, fat pipes. Those are beyond the means of most hobbiest folks running their own equipment. Without those pipes, traffic will reach bottlenecks easily and usability will suffer.

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.

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.

I had some vague interest some time back in some of this some time back, the idea of a "zero-admin" network where you could just have random people plug in more infrastructure, install some software package on nodes, and routing and all would just work. No human involvement beyond plugging physical transport in.

Some things to consider:

• People will, given the opportunity, use network infrastructure as a DDoS vector. You need to be strong against that.

• It's a good bet that not everyone in the system can be trusted.

• Not only that, but bad actors can collude.

• Because transport of data has value, if this is free, you have to worry about someone else who provides transport for existing data just routing stuff over your free system and flooding it.

• If the system requires encryption to mitigate some of the above issues (so, for example, one sort of mechanism might be a credit-based system where one entity can prove that it has routed some amount of data from A to B in exchange for someone else routing some amount of data from C to D -- Mojo Nation, the project Bram Cohen did before BitTorrent, used such a system to "pay" for bandwidth), that's going to add overhead.

• If you want your network to extend to routing data onto the Internet, that's going to consume Internet resources. Even if you can figure out a way to set up a neighborhood network, the people who, for example, run and maintain submarine cables are not going to want to do that gratis. And yeah, to some degree, you can just unload costs onto other users, the way that it's common for heavy BitTorrent users to pay the same monthly rate as that little old lady who just checks her email, even though said heavy users are tying up a lot more time on the line. But if you are successful, at some point, this stops flying below the radar and ISPs start noticing that User X is incurring a greatly disproportionate degree of resource usage. I should note that there are probably valid use cases that don't extend to routing data onto the Internet, but if you don't permit for that, that's a very substantial constraint.

If anyone has to do something that they don't want to do (e.g. run line from saturated point A to saturated point B), then you're potentially looking at having to pay someone to do something, and then you're just back to the existing commercial Internet system...which for most people, isn't that expensive and does a reasonable job of moving data from Point A to Point B.

From a physical standpoint, while different parts of the network can probably use different types of infrastructure, if you want sparse, cheap-to-deploy infrastructure over an area, my guess is that in many cases line-of-sight laser networks are probably your best bet, especially in cities. You can move data from point A to point B quickly through other people's airspace without paying for it, today. Laser links come with some drawbacks: weather and such will disrupt them to some degree, so you have to be willing to accept that.

The main application that I could think of for regional-only transport, avoiding routing onto the Internet, was some kind of distributed backup system. A lot of people have unused storage capacity. You can use redundant distributed data storage, the way Hyphanet does. You can make systems that permit one user to prove that they are storing a certain amount of data to let them build credibility by requesting hashes of data that they say that they're storing. It won't deal with, say, a fire burning down the whole area, but for a lot of people, basically having some kind of "I store your offsite data using my unused storage capacity in exchange for you doing the same for me, and we can both benefit enough to want to continue use of the system" system might be worthwhile. That's also likely to permit for higher-latency stuff involving encryption and dealing with redundancy. I think that "Internet service for free" off such a system is going to be a lot harder.

I'm just dreaming here so humour me if you like, or don't, no harm done.
Would it be possible to build an independent and mostly autonomous hardware backbone for the internet using some sort of mesh-like design?
I.e. consider a mesh of nodes that are solar powered with batteries to last the night. You plop those all over the place: your roof, in meadows, on vehicles, bus stops, wherever. They connect to each other wirelessly. They should be cheap and near maintenance free. In case one dies, the mesh should have enough redundancy to compensate while the node is being replaced.

Something like that should be fully independent, net-neutral and accessible by everyone right. Although you will need a rather high density of nodes/people who join, for it to work

Like ip2?

you don’t need custom anything, you just need to set it up. You can put access points on your roof and on your neighbors’ roofs and on the roofs of buildings on a distant hill, plug them into routers, configure an addressing scheme and routing rules and you’re set.

anybody with a connection to any of those nodes can set up a server and offer content.

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.