And no, I'm not talking about pirating on the internet, I'm talking about getting your internet connection to the outside world without paying or having a subscription or license. Something like a mesh network with your neighbors with the exit node being one person's high-speed fiber line, or even an exit node through a free public wifi network that you've hidden a little repeater device within range of... something like that could be interesting. I've been thinking lately of a world where decentralized networks become more common, and where people can freely use the internet without paying an ISP. What are your thoughts?

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[–] Arkhive@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Exactly the opposite in fact. I aspire to host the exit node! I’d love for my whole neighborhood to mesh our networks together and form an Intranet of self hosted services. It’s a massive uphill battle in suburbia, but I have high hopes for similar projects in my local city proper.

[–] y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

I want to do this more my neighborhood. How's it going for you and how are you getting started?

[–] Arkhive@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 5 hours ago

See my reply to the other comment under mine. Though I’ll add I feel like I “got started” when I met a bunch of local amateur radio operators and we all got chatting about long distance, wireless data transfers, which would add a lot of resilience to a mesh system.

[–] NeonKnight52@lemmy.ca 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

This is super cool and I've always wondered if it was possible. Do you know how you'd do it? And have you started it yet?

[–] Arkhive@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I’ve “started” but only so far as working on my home lab/server and home network. In theory if I get everything setup in advance, it’s as simple as getting some high gain WiFi antennas and getting other people to put their routers in bridge mode and configuring them to extend my network.

That being said, I am building out my home server with this goal in mind. An effective mesh network will have multiple devices hosting redundant instances of all the services, and the more devices doing that the more resilient the network is. To that end I’ve taken to learning NixOS for the reproducibility. Because your system is declared in a single file, and hardware specific config is separated from that, I can turn any device into a node in the mesh simply by installing NixOS and pulling the config of an existing node.

Eventually I’d love to basically build my own routers from single board computers and high gain antennas that I can just give to people. Basically a plug and play, preconfigured device that will pickup the existing mesh, or create a new origin node if not in range.

The super long term dream or goal of this would be to include a very long range, slower connection between origins to trickle feed content changes. Depending on the dystopia we end up in, this could be done with crazy strong WiFi signals, radio, LoRa, or even (inspired by factorial logistics robots) gliders or drones that are themselves carrying mesh network nodes and fly over bubbles of mesh networks.

It’s all kind of a pipe dream, but I’m at least educating myself for a time where more people begin to realize the World Wide Web as we know it is crumbling.