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This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelera
by WD-42 8mo ago
This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town.
The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on.
The future for people that valued what the early internet provided is local, trusted networks in my opinion. It's sad that we need to retreat into exclusionary circles but there are too many people interested in making a buck on the race to the bottom.
- xantronix 8mo agoI've been looking into building some sort of Wireguard mesh service since many of my friends are distributed all across the world. I wish you the very best in your endeavours!
- purpleKiwi 8mo agoHow would that look like in practice? I've just heard about the term and I like the description of it, especially the possibilities it gives
- xantronix 8mo agoThat's a great question; it's something I still need to explore, but it would involve some sort of distributed public key database and IP address directory, then a routing table on top of that as people add more resources to the mesh. Wireguard is particularly good at transparent roaming, so it's trivial to use on portable devices or if you need to migrate your server from one provider to another.
- Avicebron 8mo agoIsn't this just Tailscale? Or Netmaker maybe if you want your own control plane?
- xantronix 8mo agoYou're not wrong; mainly this is an exercise in coming up with a solution that can evolve with the needs of a modestly-sized community with decentralisation. (Oh fuck I hope I didn't just accidentally propose a blockchain, I'm gonna kms) I'm not particularly married to one particular solution or another, or even to the idea of a control plane, or its scope or locality.
- shynome 8mo agohi, I have do it, here is link: https://well.remoon.net/ https://well.remoon.net/ source repo: https://github.com/remoon-net/well https://github.com/remoon-net/well, it only have chinese version now, afer chinese spring I will add the english version
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo agoI "got online" in 1985. I don't recall a single point in time that a geographically local internet was ever useful or of interest to me.
- iLoveOncall 8mo agoWhat about when you want to find hot singles in your area? Jokes aside, probably 10-20% of my browsing is related to local things, up to the country scale. From finding local restaurants or businesses, to finding about relevant laws or regulations, news, etc. That's not negligible.
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo agoFair point, but those information sources and those things were not connected to a local internet.
- allenu 8mo agoI think before Friendster, Myspace, then Facebook, there was a period where there were discussion forums for local communities. I think it was useful for meeting people. I remember friends in the late '90s used them frequently for chatting and some made new friends in real life that way. It was a short period, though, as more established companies came along that had a wider reach.
- xoxxala 8mo agoI got a 300 baud modem right around the same time. There were a few local BBSs that ran meetups, scavenger hunts, warez parties and the like. I got to know a bunch of the regulars from the area. Pretty cool time.
- holoduke 8mo agoBbs. Downloaded first shareware version of doom. Was it 4mb or something? I remember I had like 5kb/s and paid 5 cents a minute. My parents weren't happy those days. Now they are :)
- 8mo ago
- cortesoft 8mo agoThis seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.
- willturman 8mo agoPerhaps, but it also, by default, excludes that entire class of authentication problems that are only manifested in a non-local network. I love the idea. It's also interesting in that a local mesh doesn't necessarily need to operate using the TCP/IP/HTTP stack that has been compromised at every layer by advertising and privacy intrusions.
- kolinko 8mo agoYou’re probably getting downvoted because what you said about TCP/IP/HTTP doesn’t make sense.
- willturman 8mo agoYou're right. I didn't think that through. The stack doesn't imply that a local network is somehow exposed to those concerns.
- sky2224 8mo agoThere's only so much you can do to detect and block content that's AI generated. At the end of the day, the content starts with the people creating it. Jumping to an invite only network isn't the most ridiculous idea imo.
- anigbrowl 8mo agoThis will be about as impactful as printing out the best web articles you encounter and building a shed to shelve them in binders.
- ethbr1 8mo agoIf you'd like, flip an email my way. We've been thinking similarly. Email in profile (deref a few times)
- klysm 8mo agoWhat does a mesh network have to do with this?
- shevy-java 8mo agoIt is good to see there are some internet rebels left. Perhaps AI-Skynet will not win - but they have a lot of money. I think we need to defund those big corporations that push AI onto everyone and worsen our lives.
- majicDave 8mo agoI think the same thing, came to the same conclusion, and started working on a solution a few months back. It's getting there, I'm just trying to polish up an mp3 player at the moment based on the network, and then I have quite a few plans. Still early days, still very buggy, and I am yet to really announce it, but I'm optimistic that something like this could help a lot. https://github.com/mjdave/katipo https://github.com/mjdave/katipo
- amelius 8mo agoYou don't need to create a mesh network to start a new internet. You could also, for instance, develop your own DNS alternative.
- grahamburger 8mo agoThis is a cool idea and sounds like a fun project. That said, I imagine you could accomplish roughly the same thing with an invite only Wireguard network, with the benefit of not being geo-locked.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoWhy not just make an invite only site on the regular web? Drastically less friction.
- fragmede 8mo agoThe friction is the the point, in this case.
- lofaszvanitt 8mo ago[flagged]
- archagon 8mo agoReminds me of a project idea I had. You'd get a little Raspberry Pi style board with BTLE and battery power (ideally lasting for weeks at a time) and covertly stick it in some communal location, e.g. a cafe or library. Then you'd have it run some local-only forum software and disseminate instructions for connecting to it. The point would be to have a digital community accessible only by direct connection and bound to a physical location by design, kind of in the vein of Community Memory. It's probably too impractical to work as described, but I think that having a digital space constrained by physical access would be meaningful in a way that internet communities are not. The people you chat with would necessarily be the people in your physical environment, which would make it feel more like a local hangout than the typically vapid social media exchange. (On further reflection, it would probably be easier to make a mesh network app version of this. Hmm...)
- olyjohn 8mo agoI had hoped that by now, people would be educated and tech savvy enough on computers that something like this could be a reality. But these fucking phones and tablets have made people so computer illiterate, there is no hope for something like this working. Computers run every part of our lives, and it's fucking preposterous that learning the basics of how to operate a computer aren't part of elementary school education. Now it's just "tap app" and look how it's trapped everybody into a world of ignorance.
- Grumbledour 8mo agoI had a similar idea a few years ago and tried to set it up, but failed at making it easy to connect to. I wanted the phone to prompt you like when connecting to wifi hotspots where you have to accept some T&Cs before you can connect to the internet, but to then just show you the local services instead of actually offering internet. Honestly, this can't be that difficult, but at the time, I could not get it to work reliably.