[generalizations]

> Yeah, I definitely think they come from an era where we all didn't have a pocket communicator that plugs us into any community at will.

Makes sense. And my cohort comes from an era when we can talk to anyone, anywhere, but the channels are controlled and watched. The ability to communicate isn't special anymore, but the ability to communicate independently and privately is. We don't want communication, we want known-good (dare I say, safe?) communication channels.

[trangus_1985]

> the channels are controlled and watched

Do you think that ham radio couldn't be? Or isn't? What you really want is privacy, authz/authn concerns, and decentralization, it sounds like. And TCP/IP is about as useful as a "PHY" layer for your application as is ham radio.

Plus, solutions like what you're describing require a relative ease of use - unless you only want to talk to the 17 other people in your geographical area who have similar technical backgrounds.

[generalizations]

The whole idea of long range is that my geographical area isn't a limiting factor. I'd be on a 20kbps VPN LAN with the 200 other people in the world who have similar technical backgrounds - especially if we were running this over shortwave.

And that's just the beginning, before people put in the effort to make it more accessible.

TCP/IP isn't the point, it's the encryption that lets me send encrypted, secure emails to my friends over a network that only wideband jamming or a natural disaster can take down.

[gravypod]

Not to mention the amazing software we could build in a distributed P2P way now that we have a massive amount if research into things like CRDTs and consensus algorithms.

We could have a leaderless IRC server, leaderless peer discovery and routing, IP/DNS controlled by consensus.

[ethbr0]

The difference is that the internet, at the physical level, is centralized through interconnects. In a way that radio transmission need not be.