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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

Context is important. If the pictures are captioned "check out this awesome treehouse I built" then yeah I don't expect anything further.

Whereas if they are captioned "this treehouse is my absolute favorite place to hang out" or "everyone should build one of these for themselves" or "building this treehouse saved my relationship" or whatever then I am going to find myself wondering why that might be.

Like if I tell you that Python is just the best language ever and you ought to be using it for approximately everything you do because it will improve your life or society or perhaps even the universe as a whole, might you not wonder _why_ I think that?

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I don't know why we're even having this debate, but this thread is in response to someone literally complaining they didn't say what games they play on it (as if they necessarily even do). They've given plenty of technical info about it - certainly more than they're obliged to, which is none - and anyone who would do something like this is going to do it their own way anyway.

I'm clearly in the target audience as I'm now considering doing something like this. The page gives me all the information I need or want.

Probably because I'm in the same camp as the person you originally responded to. It's an intriguing project and clearly a lot of effort has gone into it so I'm left wondering about how it's being used. If I were going to build something similar (as they advocate) what might I use it for?

> around half of the people on the LAN have thermal receipt printers with open access, for printing out quips or jokes on each other’s counters.

> there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”.

The above is from the linked essay about the current sordid state of the internet. It gives a few ideas for fun pastimes but honestly not a lot. Gaming with close friends is probably the majority of what I'd use a LAN setup like this for so naturally I'm left curious what I might be missing out on.

I guess you're not into networking? If so, perhaps what seems obvious to me isn't obvious to you: the network is the toy. Building it is the game. The purpose isn't the things you can do with it, it's how you do them and who you do them with. Two cans and a piece of string is still fun in the age of cellphones, and a treehouse is still fun to be in when you have a nice living room with a telly.

If the idea of setting up one of these doesn't sound like fun in its own right, I wouldn't recommend attempting it.

You might just want to look at setting up a friends only WireGuard, or Tailscale network.

NetBird is also worth a look—FOSS and can be self-hosted.

I mean yes, that is how I currently play games but the question was if there were activities other than video games that these guys were using their network for.

You could play any game on it. How's that?

Same reason as any other LAN party though. Like, you (average HN user) probably would wonder what's in the treehouse. But show it to a 9 year old and they'll say: fuck yeah, awesome treehouse, I want one. Filling it with activities comes later.

DN42 (https://dn42.network/) is kind of like this but public, mostly used to play with networking technologies though you could also use it to make a virtual LAN party.

Note: If you do, you should probably check the paths your traffic takes and get consent of everyone on the path, since most people expect to mostly pass network-control traffic and some nodes have very limited bandwidth. Fortunately, AS-paths in DN42 are usually quite short. If all your LAN party traffic is confined to your own network then obviously it's not a problem.

If you built one of these you could also connect it to DN42 as-is, being aware more people will be able to access your network if not firewalled.

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