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
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.
I also don’t see how hobbyists can install undersea cables.
Hobbyists could probably set up IP over UHF connections though.
very interesting!
EDIT: I am not a technical. I meant more along the line of setting up a parallel infrastructure that provides anonymity and some sort modular extensibility. Ideally something that has like a box that looks like a regular router just the wifi is strong enough to cover an entire block and then these routers talk to each other in a sort of mesh.
reasons for that are that for example the current internet isn’t designed for privacy let alone anonymitiy.
AI spam is going to drown out any human content pretty soon on the regular internet. The regular internet has been hijacked/stole/devolved/self-destroyed (idk the exact details) however there was a noticeable downfall. Do you remember geo-cities?
I’m old enough to have had one and a Tripod and Prodigy page for that matter. I still don’t think the analogy holds up at all. Geocities was a single centralized commercial entity even. People contributed the content and they hosted it, this is still to this very day what traditional web hosting is. What I guess you want is more authentic, personal content?
If AI content is a chief concern, what would be the mechanism to stop the flow of it that couldn’t be applied (at a technical level) to the internet as it exists today? Or what human-driven policies could be made and policed better on a new network that nobody truly owns? (hint: this is already the internet)
stop the flow of it that couldn’t be applied (at a technical level) to the internet as it exists today?
I would assume that if the users own and operate the infrastructure they would not be subjected to the ad-revenue model and other economic forces in the market that lead to the emergence of this sort of content spam.
Ad revenue while it does convert free-service users to dollars isn’t the only means of commercialization (traditional business subscriber models for one) and as long as any financial incentives are there (not just ad-related), there will be spam of all kinds. Any general purpose medium will be come subject to this, it’s inevitable.
To the large point, a very very small amount of users have the means, capability or desire to host their own networks and services. Raising the technical bar means lowering the audience size. Even then, you’ll still find bad actors and people you don’t agree with.
Are there options to develop hardware/firmware/software that you just plug in and it figures out everything else for you? Basically the hardware, the firmware and everything designed to very much spoon-feed the user, just plug it in and use. If that can be done it would remove one barrier for many people.
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:
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People will, given the opportunity, use network infrastructure as a DDoS vector. You need to be strong against that.
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It’s a good bet that not everyone in the system can be trusted.
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Not only that, but bad actors can collude.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Those were some excellent points to consider! Especially the potential for misuse/abuse/derailment…
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Protocols and decentralization are a good step.
Curious, what kind of protocols do we need to change or replace?
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.
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.
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.
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.
you’d quickly step on some communications regulation
Yeah I suspected as much…
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
In Austria we have FunkFeuer
Which is a separate network of individuals that directly links them up through antennasexcellent comments!
you don’t need custom anything, you just need to set it up. You can put an 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.
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 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.
Figure out funding first.
self funded, you yourself as the user have to pay and maintain whatever equipment supports your node of the mesh.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
