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.
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?
Spam was a challenge for self-organized networks almost as soon as they left the university labs, 40 years ago
Thank you for specifying that you’re not technical, that helps. Your idea doesn’t make a lot of sense since you have a misunderstanding of how the Internet works, and at which levels the problems occur.
The first layer of the “Internet” is physical infrastructure. The router you mention, the ISPs you connect to, etc. All they do is move data around the world, mostly without a care to what that data is, and they do it VERY effectively. Apart from pricing or service you might not like, there is no need to replace this part of the Internet because it is by far the most expensive and complex component, and has little to do with the problems you lament. Setting your own version of this up would be vastly inferior, more expensive, and very unreliable.
The second part of the Internet is the protocols and standards used to get this data around on the physical fibre and wires that the ISPs have laid down. Again, these protocols are time tested, mostly content agnostic, and highly compatible. Things like routing protocols, HTTP, DNS, etc are all open and free to use.
The third part of the Internet is the millions of servers that actually hold the content. This could be web servers that show you the web page you’re browsing on, servers that orchestrate instant messaging, the backend to your apps, etc. This is what you seem to have the biggest issue with and it’s also the easiest (relatively) to replace.
So, now that the basics are down, let’s discuss what you want to do. You want to have your own Internet that’s seperate from the one you see. You could do this as simply as getting some people together who are like minded, making some web servers to host the things you want like a Wikipedia clone, email server, what have you, and then and then use a DNS server that only resolves your new servers and does not return results from the broader Internet. Think of a DNS server like a phonebook for computers. If you make an exclusive friends club and print your own phone book and pass it around, but forbid anyone from ever looking at the local white or yellow pages, your little group is all they’ll know but they can still use the existing telephone system.
Most protocols are encrypted these days, so your DNS and web browsing can be fairly anonymous if everyone conforms to a set of standards. If you want more you could set this whole thing up over a system of VPNs.
Long story short is, big mesh routers are just a bad idea for so many reasons that I haven’t even gotten into like RF spectrum use and maintenance. You’re better off participating in small corners of the existing Internet you enjoy (like Lemmy or other alternative sites) and ignoring the rest. If for some reason you really felt you wanted to make a Dark Web 2.0 for like minded people it can be done, but I wouldn’t start by cutting the cable to your ISP.
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.
I also don’t see how hobbyists can install undersea cables.
Hobbyists could probably set up IP over UHF connections though.
UHF is strictly line of sight, and finicky HF (which bounces off the ionosphere) might have a total global bandwidth of 15mbit/s during a good hour of a good day. For everyone. If you use the entire possible spectrum.
It’s kinda funny, the 2 meter amateur radio band (in the United States this is 144 to 148 MHz, right in the middle of VHF) is 4 MHz wide. If you add up ALL of the available bandwidth allocated to amateurs from 10 meters down, it adds up to less than 4 MHz. The 70cm band is tens of MHz wide.
very interesting!
More practical for hobbyists to launch satellites. Which some have. There are amateur radio satellites in orbit.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 could buy some ip space and setup bgp to peer with hurricaine electric or a local exchange and then be an integral part of the internet, essentially being your own ISP.
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.
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.
You mean, Like this?
Kudos for the Sega Genesis Shadowrun screenshot there.
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.
Yeah, the internet itself isn’t the issue here. It’s kind of exactly your vision. Owned by countless different entites across the world, who all work together, interconnect and make it what it is. We already have that.
The issue are the big platforms who sit on top of it all. But we don’t need to invent anything or change any technology for that. Anyone is free not to type “Facebook” into their address bar or install the app. It’s not a technological problem
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.
