this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025

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How can we build a new user-owned and -maintained internet? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by sighofannoyance to c/asklemmy

70 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

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[–] givesomefucks 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You mean Lemmy?

You want to know how people can make Lemmy?

Because anything more independent would require running physical infrastructure to peoples houses...

Like, you might be able to "wifi mesh" something together in cities, but it'll never cover everything and that's still technically using the existing network. Like, there's no "free uncharted territory" left, it's all owned by telecoms.

[–] sighofannoyance 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

How could such a mesh work in large city?

[–] givesomefucks 1 points 2 days ago

What do you mean?

Mesh networks work like torrenting kind of, people need to set up a node, and hopefully enough people set up big enough ones they overlap, then everyone can talk to each other.

There's a couple that do simple stuff like texts or calls/radio. But building a full fledged internet would take a lot more bandwidth, especially because if you want to interact from two different ends you don't go straight to the other side, your info has to travel between each node on each overlap.

So people in the middle would be constantly passing traffic which may limit their bandwidth.

You can definitely go down the rabbit hole and find out about what exists, but in the process you'll find out why we can't do what you want to.