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
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.
Kudos for the Sega Genesis Shadowrun screenshot there.
I know I loved that game!
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.
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.
Figure out funding first.
self funded, you yourself as the user have to pay and maintain whatever equipment supports your node of the mesh.
A bit late to the party, but I’ve had my eyes on two projects that would fulfill this criteria – at least in the software routing level rather than the physical level.
GNUnet is built by the GNU project. It attempts to decentralize the internet by building an entirely new communication stack that essentially creates a decentralized DNS. Their goal is to make connections private and secure connections between nodes, but not necessarily anonymous.
Personally I don’t embrace any projects that use cryptocurrency as their backend. Such as ZeroNet, Handshake, and the like. A networking protocol shouldn’t use money as foundation.
Freenet uses existing web technologies to be interoperable yet decentralized with the current web stack. It utilizes WebAssembly to create decentralized programs and uses WebSockets for interpretability with existing web technology. It also uses “Small World” routing which they have tested to be the most effective form of peer discovery and communication in a decentralized environment. Their goal is to make an efficient decentralized network. They’re leaving the privacy, security, and anonymity to other developers that want to build on top of Freenet.
Both are open source. My money is on Freenet. GNUnet seems to be trying to replace too much too soon – big if true. Freenet understands the value of efficiency and interoperability first.
There’s another project I know of called MaidSafe.
They’re trying to create a decentralized and autonomous mesh Internet (Hardware and all). The biggest challenge of making that work is ensuring there are enough data links, bandwidth and storage space available for the network to operate. And to make that happen, at the end of the day all that hardware, bandwidth and resources need to be paid for. So it also has an internal cryptocurrency to keep track of who is supplying these resources. You can earn this currency by providing storage and connectivity, and you’ll need to spend it to use bandwidth and storage. You can use your own idle PCs to earn this currency throughout the day, but if you don’t want to do that, you can also just buy some at it’s market value to use the network. (Those people using the network without hosting servers are what will give the currency any value, and how the people providing lots of resources will get paid).
I’m not a fan of essential protocols built on the foundations of cryptocurrency. Using a cryptocurrency simply adds another layer of complexity to onboarding. Along with that, because it’s inherently tied to financial value, there will generally be a decently centralized component unless handled delicately.
I’m more leaning towards a protocol free to use without any need for onboarding. If Tor, I2P, Freenet, and the like were to be built on cryptocurrency, I certainly believe a lot less people would use it.
Don’t get me wrong. I think crypto is great for its purpose of being an immutable global currency. But when it comes to trying to innovate existing infrastructure, it tends to be lackluster. Most infamously are NFT stunts that corporate entities do such as NFT Fantasy Football, and more niche things such as UnstoppableDomains’ NFT domain name. Even Filecoin and Siacoin aim to do the same thing, but really, cloud storage is cheaper and faster than those cryptos.
Along with that, because it’s inherently tied to financial value, there will generally be a decently centralized component unless handled delicately.
Well, as I understand it, their goal is to make something totally decentralized. That is after all, one of the primary features of good crypto currencies.
And the thing is, they’re trying to build actual physical infrastructure here, people running computers and routers, and they’re all using energy at someone’s expense. Given those expenses, money will have to be involved at some point if it’s ever going to work, there’s really not much way around it. So if you want this decentralized, with nobody controlling things, I really can’t see any way of doing it without a cryptocurrency.
And yeah, NFTs are garbage, no argument there. For every good use for crypto, there are a thousand truly stupid ideas.
Beaker Browser lets you make sites and have people connect to it via P2P https://beakerbrowser.com/ ; it uses the Hypercore protocol - In a way, it’s an “easier to get into” attempt, since the browser doubles as a “server”
There’s also I2P that works in a similar manner to Freenet and has much greater focus on privacy
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.
I would totally agree 100% if larger instances were somehow able to become cheaper to run/host.
Like ip2?
I guess you mean I2P?
Oops. Yes. Thanks for correction.
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.
You mean, Like this?
Hi. I’m a network specialist. The Internet is not a big truck (it’s a series of tubes).
To explain simply: time, distance and money. That’s why nobody is doing it. All the humans are spread out over too much land, and to span the vast distances between places, you need either a really long cable (see: fiber optics) with permission to run said cable over that distance, or you need wireless relays (these don’t have as much bandwidth).
The main problem isn’t getting the power to reach a particular destination… You could fire a wireless signal from New York to LA if you had line of sight with relatively little power… The problem is, the damned earth gets in the way.
So what do we get if we try? A bunch of independent communities with spotty connections to nearby communities, and it’s likely that as soon as you go any significant distance, the demand on bandwidth would vastly outstrip any bandwidth you have.
Great, now the internet is slow, shit, and half the time, doesn’t connect to what you want to access.
The Internet is set up the way it is because it’s efficient and economical to do it this way. Let me talk at you for a minute and explain.
ISPs in your local area use copper wires, such as telephone or cable TV lines that were put in place more than a generation ago, to handle the “last mile”… The fact that we can get as fast of service down 20+ year old lines is a miracle half the time. Also, anyone with fiber, go sit in the corner, you’re in a different class.
So all these last mile runs go to their distribution building that amalgamates them into a small number of high speed, high bandwidth fiber lines that go towards the nearest exchange. Not telephone exchange, internet exchange. They’re usually located in data centers.
Internet exchanges act as a nexus of cross connectivity between ISPs, and corporations that host internet services like Meta, Google, etc. As well as transit providers, international data connectivity service providers that own undersea cables… Everyone and everything that wants to communicate on the internet is connected at these points, which is why they’re in data centers. The data center is attached to the internet exchange, not the other way around.
IX-es are connected to eachother over long distance fiber cables, usually run along utility properties, like those used for high voltage power transmission towers, or run along railroads or similar. Basically anyone who has a long, uninterrupted stretch of land, probably has been approached by transit providers to run fiber across their property between locations.
It’s a huge, complex web of companies that have agreed to move customer traffic between locations.
Recreating all of that is an insane technological challenge especially for a rag tag group of volunteers and hobbyists with little money, and no resources… From scratch.
I like the idea, but implementation is going to be nigh impossible.
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.
Been a while since I’ve seen an O.G. Shadowrun screenshot.
(O.G as in the video games. I’m well aware they were a role playing system long before that)
Every single time I stumble upon topics like this i can only remember: ZeroNet
You hosted your own piece of the internet on your machine.
If the target is to just bypass the regular ISPs, that is an entirely different task. The closest I could think about would be creating wide LAN networks, capable of interconnecting with each other, in parallel.
But I risk you’d quickly step on some communications regulation. Laying out cables requires permits. Wireless signals occupy signal bands.
The closest I could think about would be creating wide LAN networks, capable of interconnecting with each other, in parallel.
Something like this was being pushed around in Wisconsin a decade ago but I forget what it was called. I only remember this guy talking about a little router-like device and said he had installed several all over the city for an alternative to the mainstream internet. But take this with a grain of salt as I don’t remember details.
Big mesh networks are ‘easy’ but I think the reality is most people don’t want to be responsible for it. They want to use utilities not run them.
Another aspect is that different people will have significantly different burdens, if you live in a dense apartment building, it can be easy to wrap up the infra for the building into an HOA or other collective, but people in suburbs or less dense areas will need huge long range antennas and underground cables that have a disproportionate cost.
I think more than a community run physical internet layer, we need neutralized, municipal internet as a utility.
you’d quickly step on some communications regulation
Yeah I suspected as much…
Wireless links can be done on certain parts of the spectrum without a license. Just need clear line of sight.
It’s a knowledge issue. Network admin skills aren’t easy, and good network admins make a lot for a reason. Coordinating to build even a regional network is difficult, much less crossing a continent or a planet. It’s harder than you think, even if you already think it’s hard.
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.
just reinvent the existing ISP model and should be approached with caution.
Not the same. A non-profit ISP has different motivations and goals than a commercial ISP.
