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sighofannoyance @lemmy.world

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

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

66 comments

  • 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 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:

    • People will, given the opportunity, use network infrastructure as a DDoS vector. You need to be strong against that.
    • It's a good bet that not everyone in the system can be trusted.
    • Not only that, but bad actors can collude.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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....

  • 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?

      • Look Into specs for helium miners for hardware and you'll have a rough idea. The real question is software stack. How such a device would be interacted with from a user interface level, how would its version of webpages would work? I imagine its webpages would have to be text based with the option to download images or audio files as seperate files like the gemini protocol displayed as gemtext. Would consumers be willing to go back to early days web 1.0 style content like blogs and internet journals? You couldn't use such a network connection for work or banking so thats another limitation.

        Look into ham radio internet and mesh networks in general its not fiction its just never seen enough mass adoption in a easy to set up onsumer bought package thats successfully advertised and well distributed.

  • 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.

  • 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.

66 comments