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
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
I would totally agree 100% if larger instances were somehow able to become cheaper to run/host.
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.
More practical for hobbyists to launch satellites. Which some have. There are amateur radio satellites in orbit.
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!
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?
Spam was a challenge for self-organized networks almost as soon as they left the university labs, 40 years ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
you’d quickly step on some communications regulation
Yeah I suspected as much…
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.
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?
Can we replace BGP, just because it’s a flaming dumpster fire?
But I have the best route to lemmy :)
You would still have that with another protocol.
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.
Kudos for the Sega Genesis Shadowrun screenshot there.
I know I loved that game!
