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
Why would you want to replace the internet at a technical level, which is what the post appears to be focused on?
There’s plenty of arguments to burn-it-down at a social level, but building a second technical implementation doesn’t get you around those. Having individuals own more of the core doesn’t do much when the network level itself is largely neutral to the content that passes through it.
Also the core of the internet is built around big, fat pipes. Those are beyond the means of most hobbiest folks running their own equipment. Without those pipes, traffic will reach bottlenecks easily and usability will suffer.
I also don’t see how hobbyists can install undersea cables.
Hobbyists could probably set up IP over UHF connections though.
UHF is strictly line of sight, and finicky HF (which bounces off the ionosphere) might have a total global bandwidth of 15mbit/s during a good hour of a good day. For everyone. If you use the entire possible spectrum.
very interesting!
EDIT: I am not a technical. I meant more along the line of setting up a parallel infrastructure that provides anonymity and some sort modular extensibility. Ideally something that has like a box that looks like a regular router just the wifi is strong enough to cover an entire block and then these routers talk to each other in a sort of mesh.
reasons for that are that for example the current internet isn’t designed for privacy let alone anonymitiy.
AI spam is going to drown out any human content pretty soon on the regular internet. The regular internet has been hijacked/stole/devolved/self-destroyed (idk the exact details) however there was a noticeable downfall. Do you remember geo-cities?
Spam was a challenge for self-organized networks almost as soon as they left the university labs, 40 years ago
I’m old enough to have had one and a Tripod and Prodigy page for that matter. I still don’t think the analogy holds up at all. Geocities was a single centralized commercial entity even. People contributed the content and they hosted it, this is still to this very day what traditional web hosting is. What I guess you want is more authentic, personal content?
If AI content is a chief concern, what would be the mechanism to stop the flow of it that couldn’t be applied (at a technical level) to the internet as it exists today? Or what human-driven policies could be made and policed better on a new network that nobody truly owns? (hint: this is already the internet)
I would assume that if the users own and operate the infrastructure they would not be subjected to the ad-revenue model and other economic forces in the market that lead to the emergence of this sort of content spam.
Ad revenue while it does convert free-service users to dollars isn’t the only means of commercialization (traditional business subscriber models for one) and as long as any financial incentives are there (not just ad-related), there will be spam of all kinds. Any general purpose medium will be come subject to this, it’s inevitable.
To the large point, a very very small amount of users have the means, capability or desire to host their own networks and services. Raising the technical bar means lowering the audience size. Even then, you’ll still find bad actors and people you don’t agree with.
Are there options to develop hardware/firmware/software that you just plug in and it figures out everything else for you? Basically the hardware, the firmware and everything designed to very much spoon-feed the user, just plug it in and use. If that can be done it would remove one barrier for many people.
Thank you for specifying that you’re not technical, that helps. Your idea doesn’t make a lot of sense since you have a misunderstanding of how the Internet works, and at which levels the problems occur.
The first layer of the “Internet” is physical infrastructure. The router you mention, the ISPs you connect to, etc. All they do is move data around the world, mostly without a care to what that data is, and they do it VERY effectively. Apart from pricing or service you might not like, there is no need to replace this part of the Internet because it is by far the most expensive and complex component, and has little to do with the problems you lament. Setting your own version of this up would be vastly inferior, more expensive, and very unreliable.
The second part of the Internet is the protocols and standards used to get this data around on the physical fibre and wires that the ISPs have laid down. Again, these protocols are time tested, mostly content agnostic, and highly compatible. Things like routing protocols, HTTP, DNS, etc are all open and free to use.
The third part of the Internet is the millions of servers that actually hold the content. This could be web servers that show you the web page you’re browsing on, servers that orchestrate instant messaging, the backend to your apps, etc. This is what you seem to have the biggest issue with and it’s also the easiest (relatively) to replace.
So, now that the basics are down, let’s discuss what you want to do. You want to have your own Internet that’s seperate from the one you see. You could do this as simply as getting some people together who are like minded, making some web servers to host the things you want like a Wikipedia clone, email server, what have you, and then and then use a DNS server that only resolves your new servers and does not return results from the broader Internet. Think of a DNS server like a phonebook for computers. If you make an exclusive friends club and print your own phone book and pass it around, but forbid anyone from ever looking at the local white or yellow pages, your little group is all they’ll know but they can still use the existing telephone system.
Most protocols are encrypted these days, so your DNS and web browsing can be fairly anonymous if everyone conforms to a set of standards. If you want more you could set this whole thing up over a system of VPNs.
Long story short is, big mesh routers are just a bad idea for so many reasons that I haven’t even gotten into like RF spectrum use and maintenance. You’re better off participating in small corners of the existing Internet you enjoy (like Lemmy or other alternative sites) and ignoring the rest. If for some reason you really felt you wanted to make a Dark Web 2.0 for like minded people it can be done, but I wouldn’t start by cutting the cable to your ISP.