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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[–] sighofannoyance 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

stop wasting our time on these silly utopian fantasies

Well bad actors from all walks of life's do nothing else all day but waste their time on scary dystopian nightmares.

[–] JubilantJaguar 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Maybe but that's irrelevant. The question is how to improve things. I respect your idealism but I think that we'll get much more progress by building on past achievements than by "replacing" them. Starting over always represents a giant penalty and so is almost always always a bad idea.

[–] sighofannoyance 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

But sometimes whoever owns the infrastructure has you by the balls/ovaries and the only way to break free is to host everything yourself and own, run and maintain the infrastructure from a grassroots level.

Issues like net-neutrality stem from users not having control over the underlying systems.

[–] JubilantJaguar 7 points 2 days ago

The underlying system, if you mean the IP layer, is controlled by non-governmental organizations like ICANN. It's already as open as any system can be in a world of nation states. If someone is censoring you then you can host in another more liberal jurisdiction, or even with a geopolitical enemy like Russia. Sure, your home jurisdiction could still block your site. But this is a problem of laws, it's not something that has an easy technical fix. Same goes for net neutrality, which is a legal concept not a technical one.

The way to get a better internet is above all to vote for it and lobby for it. Boring but true.