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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
