alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
Replies
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
You don't need to create a mesh network to start a new internet.
You could also, for instance, develop your own DNS alternative.
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.
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!
If you'd like, flip an email my way. We've been thinking similarly.
Email in profile (deref a few times)
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.
This will be about as impactful as printing out the best web articles you encounter and building a shed to shelve them in binders.
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.