| ▲ | WD-42 3 hours ago |
| This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for people that valued what the early internet provided is local, trusted networks in my opinion. It's sad that we need to retreat into exclusionary circles but there are too many people interested in making a buck on the race to the bottom. |
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| ▲ | cortesoft 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet. |
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| ▲ | EvanAnderson 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Even if it was a "network connection" issue creating an overlay network on top of the Internet (with VPN tunnels and mesh routing, for example) would yield wildly better bandwidth and latency characteristics. You can still make that overlay network geofenced and vetted. Heck, running it over a local ISP's last mile would probably yield wonderful latency. We need vetted webrings on the existing Internet, not a new Internet. | | |
| ▲ | wizardforhire an hour ago | parent [-] | | Reading this back and forth so far I think you’re spot on… which leads to this open question, wheres the consolidated stack that makes this accessible? Also I think the name vetted webrings or just the vetted web is simple enough to be a movement. As in the vetted web movement. … gotta start somewhere. |
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| ▲ | noosphr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. Everyone serving a website is being ddos by AI agents right now. A local mesh network is one way to make sure that no one with a terabit network can index you. | | |
| ▲ | lowtidebridge an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | You could set up two way TLS with client certificates | |
| ▲ | pphysch an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then firewall traffic that doesn't come from your local ISP blocks or authenticated users. |
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| ▲ | sky2224 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's only so much you can do to detect and block content that's AI generated. At the end of the day, the content starts with the people creating it. Jumping to an invite only network isn't the most ridiculous idea imo. | | |
| ▲ | drysart 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The best solution for dealing with AI content slop flooding your eyeballs is to hang out in places small enough to be a community -- like a local area mesh network. AI slop thrives in anonymity. In a community that's developed its own established norms and people who know each other, AI content trying to be passed off as genuine stands out like a sore thumb and is easily eradicated before it gets a chance to take root. It doesn't have to be invite-only, per se, but it needs to have its own flavor that newcomers can adapt to, and AI slop doesn't. | | |
| ▲ | LexiMax 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can still find the essence of community on the traditional internet in places like invite-only discords, smaller mastodon instances, traditional forums, and spaces similar to Lobsters and Tildes. ...and not on Hacker News. Too many pseudo-anonymous jerks, too many throwaways, too much faith placed in gamified moderation tools. |
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| ▲ | kolinko 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What parent means is that you can with no problem build over the classic tcp/ip. |
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| ▲ | willturman 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Perhaps, but it also, by default, excludes that entire class of authentication problems that are only manifested in a non-local network. I love the idea. It's also interesting in that a local mesh doesn't necessarily need to operate using the TCP/IP/HTTP stack that has been compromised at every layer by advertising and privacy intrusions. | | |
| ▲ | kolinko 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You’re probably getting downvoted because what you said about TCP/IP/HTTP doesn’t make sense. | | |
| ▲ | willturman 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're right. I didn't think that through. The stack doesn't imply that a local network is somehow exposed to those concerns. |
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| ▲ | giancarlostoro 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why not just make an invite only site on the regular web? Drastically less friction. |
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| ▲ | majicDave an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the same thing, came to the same conclusion, and started working on a solution a few months back. It's getting there, I'm just trying to polish up an mp3 player at the moment based on the network, and then I have quite a few plans. Still early days, still very buggy, and I am yet to really announce it, but I'm optimistic that something like this could help a lot. https://github.com/mjdave/katipo |
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| ▲ | grahamburger 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a cool idea and sounds like a fun project. That said, I imagine you could accomplish roughly the same thing with an invite only Wireguard network, with the benefit of not being geo-locked. |
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| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I "got online" in 1985. I don't recall a single point in time that a geographically local internet was ever useful or of interest to me. |
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| ▲ | xoxxala 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I got a 300 baud modem right around the same time. There were a few local BBSs that ran meetups, scavenger hunts, warez parties and the like. I got to know a bunch of the regulars from the area. Pretty cool time. | |
| ▲ | allenu 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think before Friendster, Myspace, then Facebook, there was a period where there were discussion forums for local communities. I think it was useful for meeting people. I remember friends in the late '90s used them frequently for chatting and some made new friends in real life that way. It was a short period, though, as more established companies came along that had a wider reach. | |
| ▲ | holoduke 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bbs. Downloaded first shareware version of doom. Was it 4mb or something? I remember I had like 5kb/s and paid 5 cents a minute. My parents weren't happy those days. Now they are :) | | |
| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 37 minutes ago | parent [-] | | BBS were a little off-tangent if you were actually using the internet itself, which I was (or least, I was pretty sure after using JANET (UK) and Bitnet (US & Israel). |
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| ▲ | iLoveOncall 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What about when you want to find hot singles in your area? Jokes aside, probably 10-20% of my browsing is related to local things, up to the country scale. From finding local restaurants or businesses, to finding about relevant laws or regulations, news, etc. That's not negligible. | | |
| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair point, but those information sources and those things were not connected to a local internet. |
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| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You don't need to create a mesh network to start a new internet. You could also, for instance, develop your own DNS alternative. |
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| ▲ | xantronix 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've been looking into building some sort of Wireguard mesh service since many of my friends are distributed all across the world. I wish you the very best in your endeavours! |
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| ▲ | purpleKiwi 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | How would that look like in practice? I've just heard about the term and I like the description of it, especially the possibilities it gives | | |
| ▲ | xantronix 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's a great question; it's something I still need to explore, but it would involve some sort of distributed public key database and IP address directory, then a routing table on top of that as people add more resources to the mesh. Wireguard is particularly good at transparent roaming, so it's trivial to use on portable devices or if you need to migrate your server from one provider to another. | | |
| ▲ | Avicebron 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Isn't this just Tailscale? Or Netmaker maybe if you want your own control plane? |
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| ▲ | ethbr1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you'd like, flip an email my way. We've been thinking similarly. Email in profile (deref a few times) |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It is good to see there are some internet rebels left. Perhaps AI-Skynet will not win - but they have a lot of money. I think we need to defund those big corporations that push AI onto everyone and worsen our lives. |
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| ▲ | anigbrowl 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This will be about as impactful as printing out the best web articles you encounter and building a shed to shelve them in binders. |
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| ▲ | klysm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What does a mesh network have to do with this? |
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