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socalledunitedstates:
plaidaemander:
socalledunitedstates:
vodcar:
vodcar:
vodcar:
when the capitalists die out either thru global warming or revolution will we be able to start homegrown internet
been reading about dual power and how to grow my own tomatoes and i’m wondering how and if we’ll be able to start commie internet lol
like obviously the internet is this huge electric capitalist controlled hardware infrastructure thing so after all that shuts down is there a way to do it ourselves lol
i want to come home from a hard day on the communal allotment, kiss my Wife, crank up my generator, and start sharing meams!
GOOD NEWS: the homegrown commie internet is in the works! Across the world, people fighting against censorship and for a more democratic internet are building mesh networks (meshnets) of long-range wifi (LoRa)
Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!
Small antennae, like for connecting across the neighborhood, can literally be built out of trash
And a larger, more accurate one can be built pretty cheap too
(You can also reuse an old satellite TV dish, or really anything else that’s roughly parabolic)
There are LoRa meshnets in places like New York, India, and all over Europe: Spain (pictured below), Greece, Austria, Germany, etc
As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc
What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing
You can read more about this kind of stuff here (or here if it’s cloudy in Barcelona)!
there’s also the work being done by the DCPT, left-behind Detroiters meshing together their neighborhoods to share overpriced high-speed connections among the community and producing these good good educational documents, especially this rad resource page. building meshnets to share a global uplink is very similar to building meshnets for the purpose of intracommunication and these resources are useful in both cases
I’ve had a couple people ask about how to join/organize something like this, which is great! The best list of active projects I know of is here, though you should also do a search online if you don’t see one in your area in case they missed it. For those without a nearby group, put a pin here and try contacting nearby pins as well - you can use the instructions on buildyourowninter.net as well as the DCPT’s resources as linked above to get set up!
Please reblog this version so others can get involved!
Relatedly protocols like TOR, I2P, and Freenet exist, if you wish to thwart the capitalist system from within!
TOR is designed to prevent a passive agency from collecting your data on the clearnet (the open internet, roughly the Googleable internet) and supports distributed hidden services like web pages and social networks with a focus on IP anonymity.
I2P is designed specifically to be used to host hidden services and have them support fast, path-blind streaming connections, allowing you to be properly anonymous and end to end encrypted within the network.
Freenet takes the idea of peer networking to the max by allowing you to allocate some amount of space on your computer to store encrypted files, so that everyone on the network essentially has free distributed, resilient file-sharing, and, consequentially, truly distributed website hosting. Additionally, once you add a number of trusted “friends” the network overhead drops considerably and makes it far less easily detected.
All of these protocols depend, to varying degrees, on the existing infrastructure, but the latter two can be ported to any reasonable clearnet replacement (TOR is designed to access the clearnet so if that goes down, it’s far less useful) and have non-trivial academic research into them, making their concepts important for potential attacks on the aforementioned LoRa-style networks (you can’t trust everyone to be a good actor after all, and these protocols are varying degrees of trust less).
Also, for the meme, blockchain technology deserves a mention as a fully distributed trust less system, but is largely impractical for non-transactional uses and, at least in it’s current form, extremely power intensive (not good for our post capitalist commie net, which, presumably, we want to have a low-ish energy cost and have a small environmental impact).
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galadhir was kind enough to beta the first chapters for me <3 and told me to post so, so I did.