31 ms·

Winning back the Internet by building our own

178 points by sanqui 6y ago

bullen 6y ago
http://radiomesh.org http://radiomesh.org
- pryelluw 6y ago
  That site has no links. Do you have more info?
  - bullen 6y ago
    Not yet, I'm busy making a 3D MMO engine/game from scratch: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 Also hesitating between Java and C for the reference implementation. Also waiting for better hardware: LoRa is too closed and Zero uses too much energy! The radio + screen + controls PCB should be one HAT. No point in using a IPS screen that small, better would be a persistent state screen like memory LCD or ePaper. Also looking at using a smaller OS than linux... so don't hold your breath!
    - Triv888 6y ago
      https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora
      - bullen 6y ago
        I know how LoRa works, I just don't have the money to make my own open-source version at a price that could be affordable! The problem specifically is that on some chips you cannot control the frequency hopping manually!
- grep_name 6y ago
  How can I follow this project?
fsflover 6y ago
I2P [0] does not require a special infrastructure and provides strong anonymity on top of existing networks. [0] https://geti2p.net https://geti2p.net
- miketery 6y ago
  This is pretty awesome. What are the missing pieces to get people using this? Is there a need? I think it's being able to launch infrastructure like AWS but for consumers. Imagine one click to launch your "virtual home" / bastion. You can mange your virtual home from trusted devices (desktop, mobile, possibly web if you grant keys to 3rd party). In your virtual home you can setup I2P, a personal VPN (e.g. algo by trailofbits), tunnel/forward home server traffic to public internet (e.g. RPi), install torrent client & fire sharing drive for family, etc. Thoughts?
  - Funes- 6y ago
    >What are the missing pieces to get people using this? It's generally slow and it needs port forwarding to work correctly. Its design (whether you look at the java router, I2P, or the C++ one, i2pd) isn't really noob-friendly, either. That's more than enough to deter almost everyone from using it, it seems. >Is there a need? I'd say there's an ever-increasing need for anonymous, uncensorable platforms on the Internet. I wager we will progressively notice an urgency to turn to this kind of applications in the coming years. I hope I'm wrong on this one, but I don't think my guess will be too far off.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      >it needs port forwarding to work correctly What are you talking about? You need to put a proxy 127.0.0.1:4444 into your browser setup, but I wouldn't call it "port forwarding". Apart from that, you just install it and go to the eepsites. Upd: Indeed, you will also have to wait until the router finds enough peers. >What are the missing pieces to get people using this? I would say, it only needs more people to know about it.
      - 6y ago
briefcomment 6y ago
How does this idea apply to mobile networks? Would it require access to cell tower infrastructure to work?
stargrave 6y ago
FidoNet is still living, however it lacks at least strong authentication and data confidentiality (no crypto used at all). But it shows that people could be capable of creating global networks without unwanted third-parties. For building store-and-forward networks I created NNCP several years ago and lack of connectivity, censorship (making no connection links) are one of the issues it aims to solve: http://www.nncpgo.org/Use-cases.html http://www.nncpgo.org/Use-cases.html
13415 6y ago
I'm currently building a network for a cheesy 80ies-style virtual Lisp machine from a parallel universe with libp2p. It's very cumbersome, the Go libp2p library is pretty arcane and split up across too many packages. But it does work, and when it's ready users of my machine will be able to send each other encrypted messages over a p2p network with NAT traversal.
cortesoft 6y ago
This article basically describes how the current internet was created.... why would this new internet end up any different? You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator, so someone will have to run the network for those people... and they will need to be compensated for that work... and some people will be really good at running that network, and will have lots of clients and get very efficient at running networks, so more people will hire them.... and they will get big enough to hire people and pay for laying cables between networks... and suddenly we have the exact same system we have now. What would be different this time around if we started from scratch?
- Closi 6y ago
  And as soon as there is the slightest bit of traction, the same companies would own it!
- strictfp 6y ago
  Well, the novelty of course. Everything has it's way. Radio, TV, telephony, the internet; all have gone through different phases of commercialization and exploitations. It takes time for bureaucracy to take over. Think of the natural cycle of a startup becoming an enterprise, a niche shop becoming a large chain.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  It doesn't mean anything to "start from scratch" anyway. The Network is a meme, knowing what it is has the effect of creating it. The last time it could have been possible, with tremendous effort, to divert things such that the Internet didn't become the Network and something else did, would have been around 1990. That's the point where JIPS happens. Up until then, the US has a lot of IP networking, but some other rich industrialised countries have the ITU's X.25 networking. The ITU in some sense are a logical place to look for the beginning of this Network because they oversaw technological development for its predecessor, the Public Switched Telephone Network. Anyway in the UK they have some X.25 but people are interested in this American IP stuff, so they agree to offer establishments with X.25 access to IP as well starting January 1991, in a programme called JIPS (the JaNET IP Service). JIPS is an enormous success, everybody loves IP and soon it is apparent that the future is IP not X.25. Game over, the Internet becomes inevitable at that point. Now, I care also about the last mile, "phase I delivery of the Network" meaning that ordinary citizens in most of the world have access to the Network. No iterations of the Network have been truly universally accessible. Even for the oldest (the global postal network agreed in Bern in 1874) you need at least literacy, a taught skill not truly accessible to every person. But we can get very close, and it took several more years for the Internet to do that.
baxtr 6y ago
Can somebody explain to me, what "winning back the Internet" actually means?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- giantrobot 6y ago
  It means it would have stuff they like but not things they don't like. Also normal people are unwelcome, only technically adept users but only those making things they want.
  - xpe 6y ago
    This comment strikes me as uncharitable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  There is a widespread perception that the old-style Internet of independent small sites has been subsumed by large social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. The ease of use, UX and network effect generated by these networks mean that it's a struggle to stay away from them and do your own thing. This is good for the non-technical folk, but leaves technical folk out in the cold because there are no major platforms that serve their needs. "Winning back the internet" refers to pushing back against the dominance of those large centralized sites and the efforts to build the number of independent sites.
Munksgaard 6y ago
I think gemini[0] is an interesting alternative to the regular internet. It's deliberately designed to avoid many of the things making the web terrible[1]. 0: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ 1: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  In throwing out the complexity of HTML, Gemini is also disposing of some markup that really helped screenreaders properly handle content. It would be a real shame if this "return to the good internet" left out the visually impaired. I agree with the goals of returning to a more bare-bones, text-heavy internet, but please, include the disabled in your vision from day one!
  - Munksgaard 6y ago
    I must admit that I don't know anything about screenreading or accessibility in general, but I think you raise a valid concern: Certainly, the "next-generation good internet" should be accessible to all. However, I would think that being much simpler (also, mind you, content-wise) would be a positive thing for gemini, in this context? Would you care to elaborate on what kinds of things are made harder by the choices gemini made? And what do you think could be done to alleviate those problems?
  - blindgeek 6y ago
    As a blind person, I dearly miss the textual Internet as it was. The original Internet -- the textual one -- was perfectly accessible. The extra markup added to HTML to help screen readers was added because the web stack had gotten too complex, not because it was too simple.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      The lang attribute added to the span tag in HTML really helps with ensuring that a screenreader outputs quoted foreign-language text in that language, instead of just pronouncing gibberish. And this tag and attribute go pretty far back into the 1990s, it is not part of the modern-web-gone-mad. So, similar markup is one of those little things that Gemini should have thought about from the very beginning, and it would not have made their stack appreciably more complex.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Shorter: We could and should build local networks, but we can't build inter-networking infrastructure, so we'll just piggyback on the existing longer haul (0) infrastructure but not worry about it because it will be our protocols and data. So we won't actually build our own internet at all. (0) longer haul seems to mean more or less above the maximum length of a segment of CatN cable and/or reach of medium powered wifi transmitter.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
It's not just that corporations own a lot of the physical infrastructure. Another factor is that humans as a group tend to force other humans to commercialize what they do, even if they expressly don't want to do that and would rather publish it without ads, without paywalls, without subscriptions, etc. We do a poor job of making it possible for people who create open source and people who create free content to get enough money out of that to give things away freely in service of their ideals. And after a while, people sometimes get fed up with working for free, seeing it benefit other people and not benefit them. I complain a lot about that wrt to my own writing, but I'm not the only one. I've seen posts recently that complain about big companies using open source and/or open source providers being fed up with working for free. Just a couple of things that come readily to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25186890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25186890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032105 I find this maddening, especially when the idea of UBI is so popular. We actively punish people doing good works and tell them "Up yours. If you are an idealist, you can do it for free and find some other way to pay your bills." and then also say "We should just give money away to all the poor people simply for existing" while not actually making that a reality. Talk of UBI makes me think of people I have known in the past who would make conditional promises, like "If I win the lottery, I will give you half." Somewhere along the way I figured out that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" and to not trust "naked men offering you the shirt off their back." People who actually want to make something happen will do the small thing in their power to accomplish today. People who make big promises based on long-shot bets (or on the idea that you need to make a big sacrifice before they will consider doing something for you -- and, no, it's not a stated as part of some kind of enforceable contract) are con artists, liars, manipulators and people wanting to be seen as "good guys" based on hot air without having to go through the pain and suffering typically required to do any real good in this world. If you want a better world, pry open your wallet and give a dollar to Patreon for an independent artist or a $5 PayPal tip or something. It's sort of a myth that big problems need big solutions. The antidote to a behemoth problem is often not some other equally powerful behemoth. It's often enough "little" solutions to weigh as much, so to speak. Start investing in the small answers. They are easier to reach and support and more likely to be a real antidote.
- 6y ago
lazyjones 6y ago
I stopped reading at "would-be dictators like Trump".
- k33n 6y ago
  I made a similar comment. Both will be flagged and removed soon. If there's one thing HN hates, it's people who don't hate Trump. It's sort of ironic that this article purports to be "anti establishment" and then parrots a the most establishment-friendly talking point imaginable.
  - Hnrobert42 6y ago
    I downvoted you, but I don’t hate you or your ideas. I just disagree with them.
    - spurgu 6y ago
      That's not what downvotes are for (unless you're on Reddit). Downvotes are for wrong or misleading comments. If something is against the rules it can be downvoted and flagged. If you disagree, just move on, ignore the comment. If you support/like a comment, upvote it. This is at least how I see it on HN. Edit: Downvoted, sigh.
      - zepto 6y ago
        See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
      - Hnrobert42 6y ago
        That’s what I thought, too. However, that’s not what the guidelines say. I had to go read them again.
        spurgu 6y ago
        The top comment (in the parallel reply[0]) actually seems to agree with me[1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333255 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
ampdepolymerase 6y ago
The most difficult part is the backbone, not the software. The internet's power comes from its large scale and resilience, bypassing censorship and copyright is just a side effect. WiFi Dabba's [0] approach is quite interesting but I am not sure whether it will scale well in practice. Optical communications through free space generally requires line of sight and the bandwidth is low due to atmospheric losses. Broadcasting across oceans is another issue, especially when sovereignty is involved. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790350
breck 6y ago
I was trying to make something recently, and I couldn't find the source material any more on the web. Luckily I turned to Pirate Bay and bittorrent and found what I needed. I forget how cool those things are.
alex_young 6y ago
Somehow the BBS was so much easier to connect to than your bookstore LAN is today. No TOR required, just a modem and a phone line.
- Triv888 6y ago
  I dont miss my 2400bps modem though... And my cga porn
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Without the Javascript: curl -s https://roarmag.org/essays/win-back-the-internet/| grep -o "<p>.*</p>" > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
ozim 6y ago
Well I clicked it because I am quite a fan of making internet more open. Unfortunately this article in my opinion is at best just bad and misguided. New laptops rarely have RJ-45 nowadays, point here is that article is technically misleading and overly simplistic. You are not going to achieve much by just connecting laptops with cable, let alone just switches and then connecting those to more switches, it is far more complicated. I don't believe in piece below to be true, because one had to be in academia, science facility or government to connect: "For a very long time, no one paid for Internet access because Internet access was not something that was sold. It was like a public beachfront at the ocean. If you were near it, you could jump in, no credit card required.". In the end "focus on infrastructure, not coding" because "programmers useful only for large companies". Most of that infrastructure needs code that is written by programmers.
- floren 6y ago
  > I don't believe in piece below to be true, because one had to be in academia, science facility or government to connect: "For a very long time, no one paid for Internet access because Internet access was not something that was sold. It was like a public beachfront at the ocean. If you were near it, you could jump in, no credit card required.". When the author says "if you were near it, you could jump it", they meant "near it" == "in academia, defense, or government".
k33n 6y ago
> Would-be dictators like Trump and others across the globe use the Internet to bend both people and institutions to their will using misinformation and fear. Once Trump is gone, who will the simpletons hate? Elon Musk, probably.
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  Why do you assume hating on Trump is the exclusive domain of simpletons?
  - k33n 6y ago
    Because Trump hate was literally spoon-fed to you. There's not a single rabid Trump hater who hated him before 2016. Ad spend is a heck of a thing. The simpletons can be made to hate or love anyone. It's just PR, and you fell for it.
    - spurgu 6y ago
      I couldn't really care less about Trump before he was elected. And mind you I'm from Europe. That said once he became president it quickly became apparent what a danger he presented not only to the US but also to the rest of the world. I'm seeing political echoes all around Europe. Not looking forward to seeing claims of election fraud here in a year or two... and this is just the most recent outrageous thing he's done. His whole political career has been full of facepalming moments. He is not fit to be a businessman (he's failed at it miserably) and definitely not to lead a country and I'm shocked to see anyone who doesn't realize that. I don't care if the US is run by a republican or a democrat, just let it not be an illiterate moron.
      - AntiImperialist 6y ago
        >That said once he became president it quickly became apparent what a danger he presented not only to the US but also to the rest of the world. You do realize that all the things you're saying is just spoon-fed garbage that everyone around the world who's exposed to the same PR material would also say, right? There are many levels of anti-Trump PR material. The political strategists have to try to advertise to various intellectual levels and various kinds of people. The things you are espousing is from the lowest level that is designed to cater to wide variety of lowest information voters.
jaimex2 6y ago
Great idea, let's call it PiperNet.
Hnrobert42 6y ago
Discussing torrents: > people were more easily able to access the things they needed without being forced to ask or pay for permission to have them. Haha. We’re not talking about folks stealing bread to feed their family. We’re talking about people stealing entertainment. There’s a lot wrong with big media corporations: DMCA takedown notice misuse, copyright for life of the artist + 75 years, exploitative contracts, and so on. But let’s be honest, watching movies and show you didn’t pay for is theft. Rationalize it however you want, but it still theft.
- hossbeast 6y ago
  The piece could be made a lot more effective by acknowledging this.
- humanrebar 6y ago
  It's rude and dishonorable to take something someone doesn't want to give you. Even so, it's not the same category of misdeed as stealing bread. If you eat a loaf of bread, someone else cannot. But if you perform or listen to a song, it's still there for others. Sometimes, especially in the case of technically copyrighted but practically abandoned works, sharing the work is actually more likely to keep it available for others to discover or even access at all.
  - cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
    > If you eat a loaf of bread, someone else cannot. But if you perform or listen to a song, it's still there for others. OK, that's good for you and the "others", but what about the person who spent time and energy to write the song and perform? Just because it's "still there for others", it's ok to steal it? You are only thinking from the consumer's point of view and neglecting why people produce things of value in the first place. If they don't get rewarded, they will simply stop producing value.
    - robocat 6y ago
      > If they don't get rewarded, they will simply stop producing value. Not in the case of music. The vast majority is given away for free (some in the hope of future financial success, but plenty just for the hell of it). If the vast majority were not addicted to popular tracks, the marginal price of music would drop to zero pretty quickly.
Uptrenda 6y ago
It's a good article but light on the technical side. I would have liked to know more about alternative networking technologies that what make the vision possible beyond 'running ethernet cables' to different neighbors houses... There is likely to be all kinds of radio tech that could make town-size and then town-to-town links possible. But that's a niche subject
jrnichols 6y ago
The internet as we know it would be just fine if we de-commercialized it. Most websites as we know it don't need to be riddled with ads, google fonts, social media trackers, analytics. "But how do we make money from it?" - if that's the first thought, then maybe it doesn't need to be there. I'd rather have the internet for sharing reliable information, not advertising. It was doing just fine before corporate marketing took it all over. We can win it back by stripping it down from the bloated mess that it has become.
- xpe 6y ago
  What are some alternatives you would suggest? Please incorporate these aspects: 1. Running a network and computers costs money. 2. Commercial forces seek out channels where attention exists. 3. There is an incentive for content providers to place ads. 4. (add your own factors)
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    Server hosting for smaller services is no longer expensive when cheap cloud servers and Raspberry Pi computers are available.
  - jrnichols 6y ago
    1. not a factor for most. they're paying for web hosting already, and that's what is covering the network and computers. I'm talking about content. 2. don't use them. ads are not a requirement. they really aren't. 3. don't use them either. People used to make simple web pages because they had information to share. They did it because they enjoyed it. Now everything feels like "how can I monetize this?" We need to change our mindset. Does the internet exist to share information or is it just here now to make money from ads? I'm quite happy self-hosting. It may cost me $5/mo. I can afford that. I can also use a raspberry pi at home and simply proxy through Cloudflare. There. Not costing me much money at all, and I still don't need advertisements. Point is that we've let marketers take over and then tell us that the internet won't survive without them. It can, and it will. It needs to.
- buildanduse 6y ago
emodendroket 6y ago
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Why would anybody sign up for an Internet that doesn't allow them to connect to people all over the country or the world, half the promise of the Internet in the first place? I think this is falling into the classic Linux trap where you assume normal people feel really strongly about your goals and proceed from that false premise.
shp0ngle 6y ago
That reminds me of GNU/Net (or GNUNet? I don't remember.) An attempt to make all layers of the internet again, on GNU software or something. And it is a forever vaporware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet https://gnunet.org/en/index.html https://gnunet.org/en/index.html
- lmm 6y ago
  I remember downloading files off it 10 years ago. So it can't be vaporware in the classic sense.
cageface 6y ago
We techies like to believe that most problems created by technology can be solved by more technology. But in fact I think that very few of the problems we're facing with the internet right now are really technical in nature. They are social and political problems that require social and political solutions.
dnautics 6y ago
Perhaps this is self-serving of me, since I want to build a product like this, but: I think honestly the problem is that these systems are not consumer-oriented products. I think there is a real desire by people to not have to live as rentiers in the digital marketplace, but there are not really products that cater to that. IMO There's a place for something that merges a NAS, with some sort of overlay over current IP that is encrypted and fully peer-to-peer. But NASes are still too hard for many consumers to set up, and most techniques to overlay over IP are likewise too difficult, and basically impossible to correctly multi-tenant (you can't share your network space with your aunt and your coworker without sharing with both). Unlike IPFS, or bittorrent, availability is important, but not critical, and you don't need to promiscuously replicate your information across the entire world, encrypted or otherwise. I think there's a market for something that is like "plug in to your local network, do minimal configuration, you can set up shared folders a la dropbox, and you can access it over the net". You can sync credentials with a username and a one-time PIN. You should be able to easily set up rules for sharing with friends, with smart defaults. I think what's interesting from a consumer perspective is that there are things you can do on such a platform that many (not all) people would think twice about letting facebook do, like tag and organize photos of your young kid and share them with relatives/friends who have a PIN. I also think that the time horizon for this is relatively short (5-years?) soon people will be so desensitized to advertisements/being a digital rentier that the opportunity will have aged out. 20-somethings don't know what a NAS is. I haven't started on this yet, but if anyone is interested, my info's here.
- balaa 6y ago
  Check out our project: https://noteworthy.tech/overview https://noteworthy.tech/overview
- Nbox9 6y ago
  Have you looked at Western Digital’s My Cloud? It’s more or less what you described.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    thanks! This looks pretty cool, I'll test it out for competition analysis. There's features i'd want (like pluggable applications) but it looks nice.
burlesona 6y ago
Not what the article suggested, but I think there’s actually more potential for local alternatives at the service level, rather than the network level. For example I’ve been considering replacing Gmail with a Helm. (https://www.thehelm.com/ https://www.thehelm.com/). Anyone have experience with that to share, or know other products that are similar: “easily run your own server for X”?
- balaa 6y ago
  There's a lot of movement in this direction. Check out: https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io https://noteworthy.tech https://noteworthy.tech (my project)
one-word-answer 6y ago
Unlikely
RalfWausE 6y ago
Am i the only one who thinks that this is the way back to the BBS / Fidonet / Mausnet etc. times? I like the idea really, but this is what this is heading for, right?
LockAndLol 6y ago
Wouldn't the "building your own" part involve using protocols like 2-5G, WiMax and others in order to have long range connectivity between meshnets? We need devices that you can plug into the wall and immediately join a local meshnet. If it provided connectivity between remote meshnets with stuff like CJDNS, we'd be making a big step towards owning our infrastructure. But we'd still need the infra setup by our telcos. Is it even possible to get rid of them?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
helen___keller 6y ago
I've spent a lot of time contemplating these ideas, as I have a personal interest in building my own friends/family intranet. Some challenges: * How do you maintain and update software reliably without becoming a part time employee for maintaining your own personal infrastructure? * How can we handle failure (such as hardware dying of old age) as gracefully as web services do, without the budget and infrastructure of a modern data center? * If you're interested in detaching from the modern web, you probably care about sophisticated privacy and trust controls. Most easy-to-find open source software is not so sophisticated. * Plugging into a lot of "modern" systems takes a lot of knowledge, effort, and sometimes money - DNS (dynamic DNS if your ISP won't offer a static IP), TLS, email, text, and push notifications, for example. * How confident can you ever be about security? Ideally you want access to your service from the internet for trusted persons and devices - but the moment you expose your service outside the LAN, you're up against the world and a single vulnerable service can spell disaster. * The most straightforward way to detach from the modern web is to yourself become a smaller, centralized service - a private facebook, if you will. But why would anyone want to take the effort of reuploading themselves and their private lives to your personal facebook? You own the data, they don't. If anything, their privacy feels more at risk, because a single person is more likely to fuck up security than the entirety of the facebook organization. Edit: Also, I think a large component is that there's "so much internet" in most peoples' lives, that I think many people hardly want more. Who wants another app, another web service, another way of sharing photos or videos or sending text messages? A large part of the complacency of the modern web is that most people (that I can see) are tired of it, whether or not they realize. There's only so much information that the modern human needs, and I think if you've spent a few years on facebook you probably feel like you need less information, not more.
TechLearningC 6y ago
Hi everyone, We are the original authors of the post and thought we'd offer some very brief clarifications since there seems to be some good discussion about both the intent of the piece and our approach to the technology. Our hope is to let you know where we wanted to see the conversation go in. Where it actually goes is, of course, something of a collective choice. We'll keep this short since some people have already provided good responses in some threads that we don't have much to add to. First, on useful but ultimately tangential technologies: fsflover writes: > I2P does not require a special infrastructure and provides strong anonymity on top of existing networks. mackrevinack writes: > the safe network is going to be autonomous so it won't even need anyone to act as an admin. all you will need to do is log in to access your files Munksgaard writes: > I think gemini is an interesting alternative to the regular internet. It's deliberately designed to avoid many of the things making the web terrible Others have suggested similar overlay networks, including GNUnet, Tor, and so on. As we state in the article, overlay networks are useful, but they are by their very definition reliant upon existing hardware devices to provide the underlying network over which these networks lay. One of the goals of our article is to point out that a hyper-focusing on such overlay networks misses the point of "owning your own infrastructure" at a deeper (hardware) level. What good is an overlay network if your ISP refuses to relay your network frames to the next Layer 2 device? In other words, LockAndLol said it best in their comment: > Isn't [Gemini, etc.] just an application layer protocol? How will that create a new hardware network? It won't, of course. That's not to discount such higher layer protocols. It's just that we're pointing to a side of the mountain that, in our opinion, too few have considered climbing: layer 1, the hardware. Second, on the path from here to there and self-hosted services as being a better first step for most people than self-hosted infrastructure. dnautics wrote: > I think there's a market for something that is like "plug in to your local network, do minimal configuration, you can set up shared folders a la dropbox, and you can access it over the net". Yes, we agree. In fact, that's how we teach things in our more involved classes and workshops: first, learn to run a service for yourself. Then learn how to build an internetworking connection to someone else, if you're still motivated and find doing this sort of thing fun. (If you don't find it fun, don't keep doing it. Replace "internetworking" with any other vocational trade, like plumbing or residential electrical wiring, or gardening, and the same advice would apply.) For most people, running Ethernet cable from one building to another or creating wireless links from one rooftop to another is a heavier lift than simply running a semi-private service on an RPi or similar with existing network infrastructure. But doing so doesn't resolve the infrastructure ownership problem, of course. It's important to recognize these two problems as the two related but distinct problems that they are. In our article, we point out also that they are technically orthogonal from one another: one can "own one's own infrastructure" and use it to connect to Facebook, for example, or one can install something like a Mastodon instance on a spare workstation in one's home closet and ask one's "tribe" to use access it over connections originating from the existing (capital-I) Internet infrastructure. From the perspective of an autonomous community, neither of these scenarios is bad per se, they are both simply incomplete. The point we made in our article is that unlike the situation 20 years ago, installing something like a Mastodon instance (or any of a bazillion other self-hostable services) is far easier and less expensive than it was then, yet most people we encounter (especially politically-inclined but not especially technologically experienced folks) tend to think the opposite is true. The perception that telecoms autonomy is less possible when the capabilities required to achieve such autonomy are actually more accessible is worth countering with more energy than we generally see it countered with. Hence, the article. Put another way: given that so much more is possible at Layer 1 at far lower price points than has been possible ever before, and also that Layer 7 has seen an arguable overabundance of focus, we feel that hacker mindshare is better spent solving the part of the problem that hasn't received as much attention or honest community investment, which is "who owns the infrastructure," not "what software are you using to share files." Finally, a few notes on the obvious political implications of this: * "Who owns the infrastructure" is ultimately a political question, as it is fundamentally a matter of what "ownership" does (or should) mean. There are cynics who seem to think that any prolonged human activity will inevitably result in the same situation as the one we have now. We'll agree to disagree on the grounds that such assertions are at best Stop Energy and leave it at that. * A number of people identified several sociopolitical forces at play here. For example, helen___keller wrote: "A large part of the complacency of the modern web is that most people (that I can see) are tired of it, whether or not they realize." Again, we agree, which is why our article tried to emphasize the utility and importance of "local services," where "local" means geographically local, not merely located on the same Ethernet broadcast domain or IP subnet as your NIC's current config. By way of example, most restaurants in the Oklahoma City suburbs do not need a Web site accessible to visitors (or bots) in Tokyo, yet that is effectively what they are paying for when they pay their monthly Squarespace subscription (aka "Web rent"). We're not trying to argue that a global communications network is not useful, because it clearly is. Rather, we're simply pointing out that when a global(ized) infrastructure is the only available option for local coordination, or commerce, it is also clear that there are some obvious misalignments between layperson expectations, economic influences, and governance models that cause conflicts that can be resolved by investing in smaller-scale and geographically-conscious "local" networking solutions. Moreover, these two models (global and geographically local telecoms) do not, technologically speaking, need to be in conflict with one another. They are "not an either-or situation, nor a zero-sum game," as we say in the article. To borrow a phrase from another recent post of ours ( https://c4ss.org/content/53915 https://c4ss.org/content/53915 ) that the Trump supporters in this thread are sure to like even less than this one: Reject the idea that successful mobilizations must be large, or that to do anything meaningful you must first do it "at scale." Instead, build coalitions with neighbors and others in your locality by building on relationships already established through earlier work building physical infrastructure together. Coalition means scaling out, not scaling up. That can begin as simply as simply as sharing your Wi-Fi password with a neighbor in exchange for splitting the monthly Internet bill. This is true physical infrastructure coalition on a tiny, almost imperceptible scale that was damn near impossible just ten years ago. We think that's notable enough to write an article encouraging people to think moderately more ambitiously about what's possible. That's all.

178 points by sanqui 6y ago

bullen 6y ago

http://radiomesh.org http://radiomesh.org

pryelluw 6y ago
That site has no links. Do you have more info?
- bullen 6y ago
  Not yet, I'm busy making a 3D MMO engine/game from scratch: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 Also hesitating between Java and C for the reference implementation. Also waiting for better hardware: LoRa is too closed and Zero uses too much energy! The radio + screen + controls PCB should be one HAT. No point in using a IPS screen that small, better would be a persistent state screen like memory LCD or ePaper. Also looking at using a smaller OS than linux... so don't hold your breath!
  - Triv888 6y ago
    https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora
    - bullen 6y ago
      I know how LoRa works, I just don't have the money to make my own open-source version at a price that could be affordable! The problem specifically is that on some chips you cannot control the frequency hopping manually!
grep_name 6y ago
How can I follow this project?

fsflover 6y ago

I2P [0] does not require a special infrastructure and provides strong anonymity on top of existing networks. [0] https://geti2p.net https://geti2p.net

miketery 6y ago
This is pretty awesome. What are the missing pieces to get people using this? Is there a need? I think it's being able to launch infrastructure like AWS but for consumers. Imagine one click to launch your "virtual home" / bastion. You can mange your virtual home from trusted devices (desktop, mobile, possibly web if you grant keys to 3rd party). In your virtual home you can setup I2P, a personal VPN (e.g. algo by trailofbits), tunnel/forward home server traffic to public internet (e.g. RPi), install torrent client & fire sharing drive for family, etc. Thoughts?
- Funes- 6y ago
  >What are the missing pieces to get people using this? It's generally slow and it needs port forwarding to work correctly. Its design (whether you look at the java router, I2P, or the C++ one, i2pd) isn't really noob-friendly, either. That's more than enough to deter almost everyone from using it, it seems. >Is there a need? I'd say there's an ever-increasing need for anonymous, uncensorable platforms on the Internet. I wager we will progressively notice an urgency to turn to this kind of applications in the coming years. I hope I'm wrong on this one, but I don't think my guess will be too far off.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    >it needs port forwarding to work correctly What are you talking about? You need to put a proxy 127.0.0.1:4444 into your browser setup, but I wouldn't call it "port forwarding". Apart from that, you just install it and go to the eepsites. Upd: Indeed, you will also have to wait until the router finds enough peers. >What are the missing pieces to get people using this? I would say, it only needs more people to know about it.
    - 6y ago

briefcomment 6y ago

How does this idea apply to mobile networks? Would it require access to cell tower infrastructure to work?

stargrave 6y ago

FidoNet is still living, however it lacks at least strong authentication and data confidentiality (no crypto used at all). But it shows that people could be capable of creating global networks without unwanted third-parties. For building store-and-forward networks I created NNCP several years ago and lack of connectivity, censorship (making no connection links) are one of the issues it aims to solve: http://www.nncpgo.org/Use-cases.html http://www.nncpgo.org/Use-cases.html

13415 6y ago

I'm currently building a network for a cheesy 80ies-style virtual Lisp machine from a parallel universe with libp2p. It's very cumbersome, the Go libp2p library is pretty arcane and split up across too many packages. But it does work, and when it's ready users of my machine will be able to send each other encrypted messages over a p2p network with NAT traversal.

cortesoft 6y ago

This article basically describes how the current internet was created.... why would this new internet end up any different? You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator, so someone will have to run the network for those people... and they will need to be compensated for that work... and some people will be really good at running that network, and will have lots of clients and get very efficient at running networks, so more people will hire them.... and they will get big enough to hire people and pay for laying cables between networks... and suddenly we have the exact same system we have now. What would be different this time around if we started from scratch?

Closi 6y ago
And as soon as there is the slightest bit of traction, the same companies would own it!
strictfp 6y ago
Well, the novelty of course. Everything has it's way. Radio, TV, telephony, the internet; all have gone through different phases of commercialization and exploitations. It takes time for bureaucracy to take over. Think of the natural cycle of a startup becoming an enterprise, a niche shop becoming a large chain.
tialaramex 6y ago
It doesn't mean anything to "start from scratch" anyway. The Network is a meme, knowing what it is has the effect of creating it. The last time it could have been possible, with tremendous effort, to divert things such that the Internet didn't become the Network and something else did, would have been around 1990. That's the point where JIPS happens. Up until then, the US has a lot of IP networking, but some other rich industrialised countries have the ITU's X.25 networking. The ITU in some sense are a logical place to look for the beginning of this Network because they oversaw technological development for its predecessor, the Public Switched Telephone Network. Anyway in the UK they have some X.25 but people are interested in this American IP stuff, so they agree to offer establishments with X.25 access to IP as well starting January 1991, in a programme called JIPS (the JaNET IP Service). JIPS is an enormous success, everybody loves IP and soon it is apparent that the future is IP not X.25. Game over, the Internet becomes inevitable at that point. Now, I care also about the last mile, "phase I delivery of the Network" meaning that ordinary citizens in most of the world have access to the Network. No iterations of the Network have been truly universally accessible. Even for the oldest (the global postal network agreed in Bern in 1874) you need at least literacy, a taught skill not truly accessible to every person. But we can get very close, and it took several more years for the Internet to do that.

baxtr 6y ago

Can somebody explain to me, what "winning back the Internet" actually means?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
giantrobot 6y ago
It means it would have stuff they like but not things they don't like. Also normal people are unwelcome, only technically adept users but only those making things they want.
- xpe 6y ago
  This comment strikes me as uncharitable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
selfhoster11 6y ago
There is a widespread perception that the old-style Internet of independent small sites has been subsumed by large social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. The ease of use, UX and network effect generated by these networks mean that it's a struggle to stay away from them and do your own thing. This is good for the non-technical folk, but leaves technical folk out in the cold because there are no major platforms that serve their needs. "Winning back the internet" refers to pushing back against the dominance of those large centralized sites and the efforts to build the number of independent sites.

Munksgaard 6y ago

I think gemini[0] is an interesting alternative to the regular internet. It's deliberately designed to avoid many of the things making the web terrible[1]. 0: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ 1: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
In throwing out the complexity of HTML, Gemini is also disposing of some markup that really helped screenreaders properly handle content. It would be a real shame if this "return to the good internet" left out the visually impaired. I agree with the goals of returning to a more bare-bones, text-heavy internet, but please, include the disabled in your vision from day one!
- Munksgaard 6y ago
  I must admit that I don't know anything about screenreading or accessibility in general, but I think you raise a valid concern: Certainly, the "next-generation good internet" should be accessible to all. However, I would think that being much simpler (also, mind you, content-wise) would be a positive thing for gemini, in this context? Would you care to elaborate on what kinds of things are made harder by the choices gemini made? And what do you think could be done to alleviate those problems?
- blindgeek 6y ago
  As a blind person, I dearly miss the textual Internet as it was. The original Internet -- the textual one -- was perfectly accessible. The extra markup added to HTML to help screen readers was added because the web stack had gotten too complex, not because it was too simple.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    The lang attribute added to the span tag in HTML really helps with ensuring that a screenreader outputs quoted foreign-language text in that language, instead of just pronouncing gibberish. And this tag and attribute go pretty far back into the 1990s, it is not part of the modern-web-gone-mad. So, similar markup is one of those little things that Gemini should have thought about from the very beginning, and it would not have made their stack appreciably more complex.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Shorter: We could and should build local networks, but we can't build inter-networking infrastructure, so we'll just piggyback on the existing longer haul (0) infrastructure but not worry about it because it will be our protocols and data. So we won't actually build our own internet at all. (0) longer haul seems to mean more or less above the maximum length of a segment of CatN cable and/or reach of medium powered wifi transmitter.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

It's not just that corporations own a lot of the physical infrastructure. Another factor is that humans as a group tend to force other humans to commercialize what they do, even if they expressly don't want to do that and would rather publish it without ads, without paywalls, without subscriptions, etc. We do a poor job of making it possible for people who create open source and people who create free content to get enough money out of that to give things away freely in service of their ideals. And after a while, people sometimes get fed up with working for free, seeing it benefit other people and not benefit them. I complain a lot about that wrt to my own writing, but I'm not the only one. I've seen posts recently that complain about big companies using open source and/or open source providers being fed up with working for free. Just a couple of things that come readily to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25186890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25186890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032105 I find this maddening, especially when the idea of UBI is so popular. We actively punish people doing good works and tell them "Up yours. If you are an idealist, you can do it for free and find some other way to pay your bills." and then also say "We should just give money away to all the poor people simply for existing" while not actually making that a reality. Talk of UBI makes me think of people I have known in the past who would make conditional promises, like "If I win the lottery, I will give you half." Somewhere along the way I figured out that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" and to not trust "naked men offering you the shirt off their back." People who actually want to make something happen will do the small thing in their power to accomplish today. People who make big promises based on long-shot bets (or on the idea that you need to make a big sacrifice before they will consider doing something for you -- and, no, it's not a stated as part of some kind of enforceable contract) are con artists, liars, manipulators and people wanting to be seen as "good guys" based on hot air without having to go through the pain and suffering typically required to do any real good in this world. If you want a better world, pry open your wallet and give a dollar to Patreon for an independent artist or a $5 PayPal tip or something. It's sort of a myth that big problems need big solutions. The antidote to a behemoth problem is often not some other equally powerful behemoth. It's often enough "little" solutions to weigh as much, so to speak. Start investing in the small answers. They are easier to reach and support and more likely to be a real antidote.

6y ago

lazyjones 6y ago

I stopped reading at "would-be dictators like Trump".

k33n 6y ago
I made a similar comment. Both will be flagged and removed soon. If there's one thing HN hates, it's people who don't hate Trump. It's sort of ironic that this article purports to be "anti establishment" and then parrots a the most establishment-friendly talking point imaginable.
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  I downvoted you, but I don’t hate you or your ideas. I just disagree with them.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    That's not what downvotes are for (unless you're on Reddit). Downvotes are for wrong or misleading comments. If something is against the rules it can be downvoted and flagged. If you disagree, just move on, ignore the comment. If you support/like a comment, upvote it. This is at least how I see it on HN. Edit: Downvoted, sigh.
    - zepto 6y ago
      See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
    - Hnrobert42 6y ago
      That’s what I thought, too. However, that’s not what the guidelines say. I had to go read them again.
      - spurgu 6y ago
        The top comment (in the parallel reply[0]) actually seems to agree with me[1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333255 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

ampdepolymerase 6y ago

The most difficult part is the backbone, not the software. The internet's power comes from its large scale and resilience, bypassing censorship and copyright is just a side effect. WiFi Dabba's [0] approach is quite interesting but I am not sure whether it will scale well in practice. Optical communications through free space generally requires line of sight and the bandwidth is low due to atmospheric losses. Broadcasting across oceans is another issue, especially when sovereignty is involved. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790350

breck 6y ago

I was trying to make something recently, and I couldn't find the source material any more on the web. Luckily I turned to Pirate Bay and bittorrent and found what I needed. I forget how cool those things are.

alex_young 6y ago

Somehow the BBS was so much easier to connect to than your bookstore LAN is today. No TOR required, just a modem and a phone line.

Triv888 6y ago
I dont miss my 2400bps modem though... And my cga porn

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Without the Javascript: curl -s https://roarmag.org/essays/win-back-the-internet/| grep -o "<p>.*</p>" > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm

ozim 6y ago

Well I clicked it because I am quite a fan of making internet more open. Unfortunately this article in my opinion is at best just bad and misguided. New laptops rarely have RJ-45 nowadays, point here is that article is technically misleading and overly simplistic. You are not going to achieve much by just connecting laptops with cable, let alone just switches and then connecting those to more switches, it is far more complicated. I don't believe in piece below to be true, because one had to be in academia, science facility or government to connect: "For a very long time, no one paid for Internet access because Internet access was not something that was sold. It was like a public beachfront at the ocean. If you were near it, you could jump in, no credit card required.". In the end "focus on infrastructure, not coding" because "programmers useful only for large companies". Most of that infrastructure needs code that is written by programmers.

floren 6y ago
> I don't believe in piece below to be true, because one had to be in academia, science facility or government to connect: "For a very long time, no one paid for Internet access because Internet access was not something that was sold. It was like a public beachfront at the ocean. If you were near it, you could jump in, no credit card required.". When the author says "if you were near it, you could jump it", they meant "near it" == "in academia, defense, or government".

k33n 6y ago

> Would-be dictators like Trump and others across the globe use the Internet to bend both people and institutions to their will using misinformation and fear. Once Trump is gone, who will the simpletons hate? Elon Musk, probably.

Hnrobert42 6y ago
Why do you assume hating on Trump is the exclusive domain of simpletons?
- k33n 6y ago
  Because Trump hate was literally spoon-fed to you. There's not a single rabid Trump hater who hated him before 2016. Ad spend is a heck of a thing. The simpletons can be made to hate or love anyone. It's just PR, and you fell for it.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    I couldn't really care less about Trump before he was elected. And mind you I'm from Europe. That said once he became president it quickly became apparent what a danger he presented not only to the US but also to the rest of the world. I'm seeing political echoes all around Europe. Not looking forward to seeing claims of election fraud here in a year or two... and this is just the most recent outrageous thing he's done. His whole political career has been full of facepalming moments. He is not fit to be a businessman (he's failed at it miserably) and definitely not to lead a country and I'm shocked to see anyone who doesn't realize that. I don't care if the US is run by a republican or a democrat, just let it not be an illiterate moron.
    - AntiImperialist 6y ago
      >That said once he became president it quickly became apparent what a danger he presented not only to the US but also to the rest of the world. You do realize that all the things you're saying is just spoon-fed garbage that everyone around the world who's exposed to the same PR material would also say, right? There are many levels of anti-Trump PR material. The political strategists have to try to advertise to various intellectual levels and various kinds of people. The things you are espousing is from the lowest level that is designed to cater to wide variety of lowest information voters.

jaimex2 6y ago

Great idea, let's call it PiperNet.

Hnrobert42 6y ago

Discussing torrents: > people were more easily able to access the things they needed without being forced to ask or pay for permission to have them. Haha. We’re not talking about folks stealing bread to feed their family. We’re talking about people stealing entertainment. There’s a lot wrong with big media corporations: DMCA takedown notice misuse, copyright for life of the artist + 75 years, exploitative contracts, and so on. But let’s be honest, watching movies and show you didn’t pay for is theft. Rationalize it however you want, but it still theft.

hossbeast 6y ago
The piece could be made a lot more effective by acknowledging this.
humanrebar 6y ago
It's rude and dishonorable to take something someone doesn't want to give you. Even so, it's not the same category of misdeed as stealing bread. If you eat a loaf of bread, someone else cannot. But if you perform or listen to a song, it's still there for others. Sometimes, especially in the case of technically copyrighted but practically abandoned works, sharing the work is actually more likely to keep it available for others to discover or even access at all.
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  > If you eat a loaf of bread, someone else cannot. But if you perform or listen to a song, it's still there for others. OK, that's good for you and the "others", but what about the person who spent time and energy to write the song and perform? Just because it's "still there for others", it's ok to steal it? You are only thinking from the consumer's point of view and neglecting why people produce things of value in the first place. If they don't get rewarded, they will simply stop producing value.
  - robocat 6y ago
    > If they don't get rewarded, they will simply stop producing value. Not in the case of music. The vast majority is given away for free (some in the hope of future financial success, but plenty just for the hell of it). If the vast majority were not addicted to popular tracks, the marginal price of music would drop to zero pretty quickly.

Uptrenda 6y ago

It's a good article but light on the technical side. I would have liked to know more about alternative networking technologies that what make the vision possible beyond 'running ethernet cables' to different neighbors houses... There is likely to be all kinds of radio tech that could make town-size and then town-to-town links possible. But that's a niche subject

jrnichols 6y ago

The internet as we know it would be just fine if we de-commercialized it. Most websites as we know it don't need to be riddled with ads, google fonts, social media trackers, analytics. "But how do we make money from it?" - if that's the first thought, then maybe it doesn't need to be there. I'd rather have the internet for sharing reliable information, not advertising. It was doing just fine before corporate marketing took it all over. We can win it back by stripping it down from the bloated mess that it has become.

xpe 6y ago
What are some alternatives you would suggest? Please incorporate these aspects: 1. Running a network and computers costs money. 2. Commercial forces seek out channels where attention exists. 3. There is an incentive for content providers to place ads. 4. (add your own factors)
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  Server hosting for smaller services is no longer expensive when cheap cloud servers and Raspberry Pi computers are available.
- jrnichols 6y ago
  1. not a factor for most. they're paying for web hosting already, and that's what is covering the network and computers. I'm talking about content. 2. don't use them. ads are not a requirement. they really aren't. 3. don't use them either. People used to make simple web pages because they had information to share. They did it because they enjoyed it. Now everything feels like "how can I monetize this?" We need to change our mindset. Does the internet exist to share information or is it just here now to make money from ads? I'm quite happy self-hosting. It may cost me $5/mo. I can afford that. I can also use a raspberry pi at home and simply proxy through Cloudflare. There. Not costing me much money at all, and I still don't need advertisements. Point is that we've let marketers take over and then tell us that the internet won't survive without them. It can, and it will. It needs to.
buildanduse 6y ago

emodendroket 6y ago

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Why would anybody sign up for an Internet that doesn't allow them to connect to people all over the country or the world, half the promise of the Internet in the first place? I think this is falling into the classic Linux trap where you assume normal people feel really strongly about your goals and proceed from that false premise.

shp0ngle 6y ago

That reminds me of GNU/Net (or GNUNet? I don't remember.) An attempt to make all layers of the internet again, on GNU software or something. And it is a forever vaporware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet https://gnunet.org/en/index.html https://gnunet.org/en/index.html

lmm 6y ago
I remember downloading files off it 10 years ago. So it can't be vaporware in the classic sense.

cageface 6y ago

We techies like to believe that most problems created by technology can be solved by more technology. But in fact I think that very few of the problems we're facing with the internet right now are really technical in nature. They are social and political problems that require social and political solutions.

dnautics 6y ago

Perhaps this is self-serving of me, since I want to build a product like this, but: I think honestly the problem is that these systems are not consumer-oriented products. I think there is a real desire by people to not have to live as rentiers in the digital marketplace, but there are not really products that cater to that. IMO There's a place for something that merges a NAS, with some sort of overlay over current IP that is encrypted and fully peer-to-peer. But NASes are still too hard for many consumers to set up, and most techniques to overlay over IP are likewise too difficult, and basically impossible to correctly multi-tenant (you can't share your network space with your aunt and your coworker without sharing with both). Unlike IPFS, or bittorrent, availability is important, but not critical, and you don't need to promiscuously replicate your information across the entire world, encrypted or otherwise. I think there's a market for something that is like "plug in to your local network, do minimal configuration, you can set up shared folders a la dropbox, and you can access it over the net". You can sync credentials with a username and a one-time PIN. You should be able to easily set up rules for sharing with friends, with smart defaults. I think what's interesting from a consumer perspective is that there are things you can do on such a platform that many (not all) people would think twice about letting facebook do, like tag and organize photos of your young kid and share them with relatives/friends who have a PIN. I also think that the time horizon for this is relatively short (5-years?) soon people will be so desensitized to advertisements/being a digital rentier that the opportunity will have aged out. 20-somethings don't know what a NAS is. I haven't started on this yet, but if anyone is interested, my info's here.

balaa 6y ago
Check out our project: https://noteworthy.tech/overview https://noteworthy.tech/overview
Nbox9 6y ago
Have you looked at Western Digital’s My Cloud? It’s more or less what you described.
- dnautics 6y ago
  thanks! This looks pretty cool, I'll test it out for competition analysis. There's features i'd want (like pluggable applications) but it looks nice.

burlesona 6y ago

Not what the article suggested, but I think there’s actually more potential for local alternatives at the service level, rather than the network level. For example I’ve been considering replacing Gmail with a Helm. (https://www.thehelm.com/ https://www.thehelm.com/). Anyone have experience with that to share, or know other products that are similar: “easily run your own server for X”?

balaa 6y ago
There's a lot of movement in this direction. Check out: https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io https://noteworthy.tech https://noteworthy.tech (my project)

one-word-answer 6y ago

Unlikely

RalfWausE 6y ago

Am i the only one who thinks that this is the way back to the BBS / Fidonet / Mausnet etc. times? I like the idea really, but this is what this is heading for, right?

LockAndLol 6y ago

Wouldn't the "building your own" part involve using protocols like 2-5G, WiMax and others in order to have long range connectivity between meshnets? We need devices that you can plug into the wall and immediately join a local meshnet. If it provided connectivity between remote meshnets with stuff like CJDNS, we'd be making a big step towards owning our infrastructure. But we'd still need the infra setup by our telcos. Is it even possible to get rid of them?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

helen___keller 6y ago

I've spent a lot of time contemplating these ideas, as I have a personal interest in building my own friends/family intranet. Some challenges: * How do you maintain and update software reliably without becoming a part time employee for maintaining your own personal infrastructure? * How can we handle failure (such as hardware dying of old age) as gracefully as web services do, without the budget and infrastructure of a modern data center? * If you're interested in detaching from the modern web, you probably care about sophisticated privacy and trust controls. Most easy-to-find open source software is not so sophisticated. * Plugging into a lot of "modern" systems takes a lot of knowledge, effort, and sometimes money - DNS (dynamic DNS if your ISP won't offer a static IP), TLS, email, text, and push notifications, for example. * How confident can you ever be about security? Ideally you want access to your service from the internet for trusted persons and devices - but the moment you expose your service outside the LAN, you're up against the world and a single vulnerable service can spell disaster. * The most straightforward way to detach from the modern web is to yourself become a smaller, centralized service - a private facebook, if you will. But why would anyone want to take the effort of reuploading themselves and their private lives to your personal facebook? You own the data, they don't. If anything, their privacy feels more at risk, because a single person is more likely to fuck up security than the entirety of the facebook organization. Edit: Also, I think a large component is that there's "so much internet" in most peoples' lives, that I think many people hardly want more. Who wants another app, another web service, another way of sharing photos or videos or sending text messages? A large part of the complacency of the modern web is that most people (that I can see) are tired of it, whether or not they realize. There's only so much information that the modern human needs, and I think if you've spent a few years on facebook you probably feel like you need less information, not more.

TechLearningC 6y ago

Hi everyone, We are the original authors of the post and thought we'd offer some very brief clarifications since there seems to be some good discussion about both the intent of the piece and our approach to the technology. Our hope is to let you know where we wanted to see the conversation go in. Where it actually goes is, of course, something of a collective choice. We'll keep this short since some people have already provided good responses in some threads that we don't have much to add to. First, on useful but ultimately tangential technologies: fsflover writes: > I2P does not require a special infrastructure and provides strong anonymity on top of existing networks. mackrevinack writes: > the safe network is going to be autonomous so it won't even need anyone to act as an admin. all you will need to do is log in to access your files Munksgaard writes: > I think gemini is an interesting alternative to the regular internet. It's deliberately designed to avoid many of the things making the web terrible Others have suggested similar overlay networks, including GNUnet, Tor, and so on. As we state in the article, overlay networks are useful, but they are by their very definition reliant upon existing hardware devices to provide the underlying network over which these networks lay. One of the goals of our article is to point out that a hyper-focusing on such overlay networks misses the point of "owning your own infrastructure" at a deeper (hardware) level. What good is an overlay network if your ISP refuses to relay your network frames to the next Layer 2 device? In other words, LockAndLol said it best in their comment: > Isn't [Gemini, etc.] just an application layer protocol? How will that create a new hardware network? It won't, of course. That's not to discount such higher layer protocols. It's just that we're pointing to a side of the mountain that, in our opinion, too few have considered climbing: layer 1, the hardware. Second, on the path from here to there and self-hosted services as being a better first step for most people than self-hosted infrastructure. dnautics wrote: > I think there's a market for something that is like "plug in to your local network, do minimal configuration, you can set up shared folders a la dropbox, and you can access it over the net". Yes, we agree. In fact, that's how we teach things in our more involved classes and workshops: first, learn to run a service for yourself. Then learn how to build an internetworking connection to someone else, if you're still motivated and find doing this sort of thing fun. (If you don't find it fun, don't keep doing it. Replace "internetworking" with any other vocational trade, like plumbing or residential electrical wiring, or gardening, and the same advice would apply.) For most people, running Ethernet cable from one building to another or creating wireless links from one rooftop to another is a heavier lift than simply running a semi-private service on an RPi or similar with existing network infrastructure. But doing so doesn't resolve the infrastructure ownership problem, of course. It's important to recognize these two problems as the two related but distinct problems that they are. In our article, we point out also that they are technically orthogonal from one another: one can "own one's own infrastructure" and use it to connect to Facebook, for example, or one can install something like a Mastodon instance on a spare workstation in one's home closet and ask one's "tribe" to use access it over connections originating from the existing (capital-I) Internet infrastructure. From the perspective of an autonomous community, neither of these scenarios is bad per se, they are both simply incomplete. The point we made in our article is that unlike the situation 20 years ago, installing something like a Mastodon instance (or any of a bazillion other self-hostable services) is far easier and less expensive than it was then, yet most people we encounter (especially politically-inclined but not especially technologically experienced folks) tend to think the opposite is true. The perception that telecoms autonomy is less possible when the capabilities required to achieve such autonomy are actually more accessible is worth countering with more energy than we generally see it countered with. Hence, the article. Put another way: given that so much more is possible at Layer 1 at far lower price points than has been possible ever before, and also that Layer 7 has seen an arguable overabundance of focus, we feel that hacker mindshare is better spent solving the part of the problem that hasn't received as much attention or honest community investment, which is "who owns the infrastructure," not "what software are you using to share files." Finally, a few notes on the obvious political implications of this: * "Who owns the infrastructure" is ultimately a political question, as it is fundamentally a matter of what "ownership" does (or should) mean. There are cynics who seem to think that any prolonged human activity will inevitably result in the same situation as the one we have now. We'll agree to disagree on the grounds that such assertions are at best Stop Energy and leave it at that. * A number of people identified several sociopolitical forces at play here. For example, helen___keller wrote: "A large part of the complacency of the modern web is that most people (that I can see) are tired of it, whether or not they realize." Again, we agree, which is why our article tried to emphasize the utility and importance of "local services," where "local" means geographically local, not merely located on the same Ethernet broadcast domain or IP subnet as your NIC's current config. By way of example, most restaurants in the Oklahoma City suburbs do not need a Web site accessible to visitors (or bots) in Tokyo, yet that is effectively what they are paying for when they pay their monthly Squarespace subscription (aka "Web rent"). We're not trying to argue that a global communications network is not useful, because it clearly is. Rather, we're simply pointing out that when a global(ized) infrastructure is the only available option for local coordination, or commerce, it is also clear that there are some obvious misalignments between layperson expectations, economic influences, and governance models that cause conflicts that can be resolved by investing in smaller-scale and geographically-conscious "local" networking solutions. Moreover, these two models (global and geographically local telecoms) do not, technologically speaking, need to be in conflict with one another. They are "not an either-or situation, nor a zero-sum game," as we say in the article. To borrow a phrase from another recent post of ours ( https://c4ss.org/content/53915 https://c4ss.org/content/53915 ) that the Trump supporters in this thread are sure to like even less than this one: Reject the idea that successful mobilizations must be large, or that to do anything meaningful you must first do it "at scale." Instead, build coalitions with neighbors and others in your locality by building on relationships already established through earlier work building physical infrastructure together. Coalition means scaling out, not scaling up. That can begin as simply as simply as sharing your Wi-Fi password with a neighbor in exchange for splitting the monthly Internet bill. This is true physical infrastructure coalition on a tiny, almost imperceptible scale that was damn near impossible just ten years ago. We think that's notable enough to write an article encouraging people to think moderately more ambitiously about what's possible. That's all.