How can we build a new user-owned and -maintained internet?

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Protocols and decentralization are a good step.

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 mean, Like this?

Kudos for the Sega Genesis Shadowrun screenshot there.

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

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.

Figure out funding first.

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.

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?