[immibis]

If you want to really use BGP without operating a real part of the internet, go and sign up for DN42. It's a pretend Internet built using Wireguard VPNs as if they were physical links.

One difference from the real internet: since traffic volume is relatively small and no money is exchanged, there's not really a distinction between transit and peering - you could do peering-only if you wanted to, but mostly everyone provides transit to all their peers, making the network a completely unstructured mesh (other than the large number of stub ASes who never bothered to get more than one peer!)

[nubb]

+1 to dn42 to play with routing in a really big cool environment. it’s been years since i participated but i hope it’s doing well. the work one would have to do to mimic the env is just infeasible.

off topic: i always thought mini internets like dn42 would be a super cool place to run secret/private services. fun to imagine.