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

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    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.

    • sighofannoyance@lemmy.worldOP
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      18 days ago

      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.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        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.

        • sighofannoyance@lemmy.worldOP
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          18 days ago

          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.

          • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            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.

  • psion1369@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    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.

  • razorozx@lemm.ee
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    17 days ago

    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.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      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).

      • razorozx@lemm.ee
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        16 days ago

        I’m not a fan of essential protocols built on the foundations of cryptocurrency. Using a cryptocurrency simply adds another layer of complexity to onboarding. Along with that, because it’s inherently tied to financial value, there will generally be a decently centralized component unless handled delicately.

        I’m more leaning towards a protocol free to use without any need for onboarding. If Tor, I2P, Freenet, and the like were to be built on cryptocurrency, I certainly believe a lot less people would use it.

        Don’t get me wrong. I think crypto is great for its purpose of being an immutable global currency. But when it comes to trying to innovate existing infrastructure, it tends to be lackluster. Most infamously are NFT stunts that corporate entities do such as NFT Fantasy Football, and more niche things such as UnstoppableDomains’ NFT domain name. Even Filecoin and Siacoin aim to do the same thing, but really, cloud storage is cheaper and faster than those cryptos.

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          Along with that, because it’s inherently tied to financial value, there will generally be a decently centralized component unless handled delicately.

          Well, as I understand it, their goal is to make something totally decentralized. That is after all, one of the primary features of good crypto currencies.

          And the thing is, they’re trying to build actual physical infrastructure here, people running computers and routers, and they’re all using energy at someone’s expense. Given those expenses, money will have to be involved at some point if it’s ever going to work, there’s really not much way around it. So if you want this decentralized, with nobody controlling things, I really can’t see any way of doing it without a cryptocurrency.

          And yeah, NFTs are garbage, no argument there. For every good use for crypto, there are a thousand truly stupid ideas.

  • nycki@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    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.

  • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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    18 days ago

    you don’t need custom anything, you just need to set it up. You can put access points on your roof and on your neighbors’ roofs and on the roofs of buildings on a distant hill, plug them into routers, configure an addressing scheme and routing rules and you’re set.

    anybody with a connection to any of those nodes can set up a server and offer content.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    16 days ago

    There’s a reddit community called “darknetplan” that’s dedicated to this question.

    I would love to see a lemmy community on the same topic.

    It was formed in response to the internet lockdowns during the Arab Spring, with the goal to discuss technology for creating a decentralized internet.

    Reading the best of on that community is a great place to start. /r/DarkNetPlan

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    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.

  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    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.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      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.

    • sighofannoyance@lemmy.worldOP
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      18 days ago

      I2P

      beautiful! Can you help me understand this better? does this run atop the regular internet infrastructure?

      What is I2P?

      The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is a fully encrypted private network layer. It protects your activity and location. Every day people use the network to connect with people without worry of being tracked or their data being collected. In some cases people rely on the network when they need to be discrete or are doing sensitive work.

  • BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml
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    18 days ago

    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.

  • L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works
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    18 days ago

    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.

  • Smokeydope@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    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.

      • Smokeydope@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        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.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    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.

  • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.ca
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    17 days ago

    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)