Ask Lemmy

Basically the problem is that you want to connect to the world-wide-internet, but you to so you need an ISP or satellite data provider to act as a middle man so they have all the control over who gets to access the internet (by paying them a service fee). What it sounds like you want is a mesh network where each user communicates with other users directly. Instead of your computer connecting to an ISP through your router, you connect to other computers in a local area network typically through wifi or radio signals. Its a decentralized network that everyone owns a small piece of which they send and recieve data from eachother.

This technology has been around a very long time. Would you like to guess why its not popular or well known? Well, its slow and only useful in rural areas where you aren't getting ISP service anyway. An intranet composed of 20 people connected in a few mile radius sharing usenet level information at download/upload speeds in the low kilobytes per second isn't exactly what people think about or want when they think of the 'internet'.

Perhaps a time will come where a consumer bought mesh based network router comes onto the market with enough advertising and appeal to be bought into by the masses with state/nation wide coverage built around a smallnet protocol like Gemini. Something like this almost happened with the Helium Network unfortunately it was designed to send smart IOT information in small packets and was only mass adopted because it was tied to mining crypto shitcoin through proof-of-connectivity. If someone can create something similar but without the shitcoin, with a mesh router box that host your website and is sold on the idea of a decentralized internet with a one-time purchase to cut out ISP it might just work.

Figure out funding first.

you cant. cause someone will have to own the hardware, to install it, to pay the bills and maintenence. So someone will always have critical control over some part or another.

and that wont go away until we become a Star Trek utopian society.. and given the way things are in the world right now, we're going in the exact opposite of that.

Hi. I'm a network specialist. The Internet is not a big truck (it's a series of tubes).

To explain simply: time, distance and money. That's why nobody is doing it. All the humans are spread out over too much land, and to span the vast distances between places, you need either a really long cable (see: fiber optics) with permission to run said cable over that distance, or you need wireless relays (these don't have as much bandwidth).

The main problem isn't getting the power to reach a particular destination... You could fire a wireless signal from New York to LA if you had line of sight with relatively little power.... The problem is, the damned earth gets in the way.

So what do we get if we try? A bunch of independent communities with spotty connections to nearby communities, and it's likely that as soon as you go any significant distance, the demand on bandwidth would vastly outstrip any bandwidth you have.

Great, now the internet is slow, shit, and half the time, doesn't connect to what you want to access.

The Internet is set up the way it is because it's efficient and economical to do it this way. Let me talk at you for a minute and explain.

ISPs in your local area use copper wires, such as telephone or cable TV lines that were put in place more than a generation ago, to handle the "last mile"... The fact that we can get as fast of service down 20+ year old lines is a miracle half the time. Also, anyone with fiber, go sit in the corner, you're in a different class.

So all these last mile runs go to their distribution building that amalgamates them into a small number of high speed, high bandwidth fiber lines that go towards the nearest exchange. Not telephone exchange, internet exchange. They're usually located in data centers.

Internet exchanges act as a nexus of cross connectivity between ISPs, and corporations that host internet services like Meta, Google, etc. As well as transit providers, international data connectivity service providers that own undersea cables.... Everyone and everything that wants to communicate on the internet is connected at these points, which is why they're in data centers. The data center is attached to the internet exchange, not the other way around.

IX-es are connected to eachother over long distance fiber cables, usually run along utility properties, like those used for high voltage power transmission towers, or run along railroads or similar. Basically anyone who has a long, uninterrupted stretch of land, probably has been approached by transit providers to run fiber across their property between locations.

It's a huge, complex web of companies that have agreed to move customer traffic between locations.

Recreating all of that is an insane technological challenge especially for a rag tag group of volunteers and hobbyists with little money, and no resources.... From scratch.

I like the idea, but implementation is going to be nigh impossible.