Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

The key, as I’ve been saying lately, is to begin building more local networks (meshes, IP over radio, sneakernets) that are totally disconnected from the normal internet. Put up a BBS that your friends can only get to by connecting over radio, or set up a private Reticulum chat with a functional non-Internet access path. Maybe set up a neighborhood wifi captive portal message board on an ESP32, hidden in a solar light.

If there are Bad Times ahead, it will be good to have this as a tested option. If not, you get a cozy private space to talk with people you know, outside of the surveillance grid.

View on HN

But they're objectively inferior to the real internet and nobody uses them. People only use Meshtastic to say "hello, I'm using Meshtastic!"

A cool idea would be to build out an ISP to a small set of hub locations using leased lines or illegally placed fiber something, but that will get expensive.

I heard someone have an idea to use a drone to lay illegal fiber across city rooftops.

Hams do stuff like this all the time, as a hobby. But yes, most people won’t be that interested. The experience isn’t the same as regular internet (and that’s ok).

If you have line of sight, or can borrow a tower that does, you could always use point-to-point wireless or laser links to build a high bandwidth backbone. This would let you play LAN games if that makes it more interesting.

I concede that most people aren’t going to be interested in this. It is what it is.

I know there are some long-range licensed fixed radio links run by hackers here, and others that are using equipment that doesn't require a license (ISM band WiFi). A local hackerspace recently for some reason got a redundant internet connection via long range WiFi to a not so local data center, increasing total uplink from 1Gbps to 2.5Gbps. I'm not sure why they did that but it sounded cool.

I love the idea of this, but I don't think I could convince my friends to use it over mainstream platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com