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
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.
What specs would this fictional device likely have?
Look Into specs for helium miners for hardware and you’ll have a rough idea. The real question is software stack. How such a device would be interacted with from a user interface level, how would its version of webpages would work? I imagine its webpages would have to be text based with the option to download images or audio files as seperate files like the gemini protocol displayed as gemtext. Would consumers be willing to go back to early days web 1.0 style content like blogs and internet journals? You couldn’t use such a network connection for work or banking so thats another limitation.
Look into ham radio internet and mesh networks in general its not fiction its just never seen enough mass adoption in a easy to set up onsumer bought package thats successfully advertised and well distributed.