[WD-42]

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.

[cortesoft]

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.

[noosphr]

>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.

[pphysch]

Then firewall traffic that doesn't come from your local ISP blocks or authenticated users.

[Bender]

I was able to block them on my silly hobby domains. Most of them were already blocked to begin with from blocking other shenanigans over the years. Even something as simple as blocking anyone that does not support HTTP/2.0 takes out most bots. Adding basic-auth also stops most of what gets through. Blocking TCP-SYN with strange MSS values cuts out many before they can even touch the web daemon.

[hnarn]

>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.

You’re missing the point, the point is that while mesh networks solve a problem, it’s not required to solve the problem ”I’m tired of the Internet” or ”I’m being indexed”. You can build your own network on top of the Internet with zero new hardware required, with something like wireguard, i2p or whatever.

[Sophira]

I don't think they ever claimed that it was the only way to solve the problem, just that they're doing it and it works for them.

[1over137]

Could you just geoblock the USA? Is most/all AI agent scraping from there?

[OrderlyTiamat]

If it's a mesh network your peers are tech savvy enough for a mesh vpn like wireguard, which also doesn't get ai-ddos'ed.

[efilife]

Geoblocking is nontrivial

[kyleee]

No

[lowtidebridge]

You could set up two way TLS with client certificates

[mycall]

That isn't good enough and could be DDoS'd as well.

[direwolf20]

There's a dead comment here saying that OpenAI doesn't just DDoS the internet because it can. That's true. Any supposed DDoS is a side effect or incompetent scraping, and won't affect anything they can't scrape. Not sure why it's dead — it's important to realise this.

Edit: oh, it's probably dead because of the username

[mycall]

Make it private invite only behind Cloudflare

[olyjohn]

Oh yes, just let Cloudflare solve all of our problems. Fuck this. We shouldn't have to rely on yet another huge company to fix this for us.

[EvanAnderson]

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]

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.

[plastic-enjoyer]

> We need vetted webrings on the existing Internet, not a new Internet.

How do you think will this work, when LLM accelerates the breakdown of trust and common epistemics?

[bigfatkitten]

But it’s a whole lot less fun and educational than building your own infrastructure. Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.

[sky2224]

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]

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]

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.

[lazide]

Potentially, but those areas are also more and more getting leveraged to further identify and profile people for targeting - see the latest Discord scandal for example.

[kolinko]

What parent means is that you can with no problem build over the classic tcp/ip.

[Bender]

This is technically correct but there is no harm in them setting up a mesh in the event that the internet goes down assuming they have their own backup power. The USA and EU are both extremely vulnerable to power grid overload, cyber-attack, physical attack choke-points leading to black-starts, EMP, GRB and much more. I think it's good on them for the learning exercise and hopefully they add to existing documentation.

[cortesoft]

If the power grid overloads, I am not sure that your mesh network will survive either?

[WD-42]

It runs off solar.

[afpx]

I'd like a semi-anonymous private network. Something like: I go to local post office and purchase a sealed token. I use the token to generate a reusable “verified human credential” with limited reuses. The credential allows me to connect to the private network.

[plagiarist]

I learned about a cryptographic interaction that can support that recently (and have spent a lot of time focusing on the idea as a means of procrastination).

I don't use Kagi but the context was their Privacy Pass thingie https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

It works similarly to what you'd like: they sign sealed tokens you provide. Later, you can unseal a token and use it without invalidating the signature. It is mathematically too difficult for a classical computer to link the sealed and unsealed token.

[jackvalentine]

You’re going to end up running down the same merry path that DRM companies do - and you can’t patch the wetware layer. Inevitably thousands of ‘human tokens’ will end up in the hands of actual humans working in call centres with 300 phones in front of them.

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/arti...

[HumblyTossed]

What happens when Comcast is told to cut off access to "blue" cities / states?

[bossyTeacher]

> This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content.

Classic HN. Focus on the tech to avoid looking at the problem.

[willturman]

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]

You’re probably getting downvoted because what you said about TCP/IP/HTTP doesn’t make sense.

[willturman]

You're right. I didn't think that through. The stack doesn't imply that a local network is somehow exposed to those concerns.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

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.

[xoxxala]

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.

[iLoveOncall]

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]

Fair point, but those information sources and those things were not connected to a local internet.

[holoduke]

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 :)

[amatecha]

Doom Shareware was originally just 2mb or so, enough to fit on two floppies: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Shareware

[PaulDavisThe1st]

BBS were a little off-tangent if you were actually using the internet itself, which I was (or least, I was pretty shortly after a few months on JANET (UK) and Bitnet (US & Israel).

[allenu]

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.

[mycall]

You never went to a LAN party then

[xantronix]

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!

[shynome]

hi, I have do it, here is link: https://well.remoon.net/ source repo: https://github.com/remoon-net/well, it only have chinese version now, afer chinese spring I will add the english version

[purpleKiwi]

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]

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]

Isn't this just Tailscale? Or Netmaker maybe if you want your own control plane?

[xantronix]

You're not wrong; mainly this is an exercise in coming up with a solution that can evolve with the needs of a modestly-sized community with decentralisation. (Oh fuck I hope I didn't just accidentally propose a blockchain, I'm gonna kms) I'm not particularly married to one particular solution or another, or even to the idea of a control plane, or its scope or locality.

[majicDave]

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

[giancarlostoro]

Why not just make an invite only site on the regular web? Drastically less friction.

[fragmede]

The friction is the the point, in this case.

[archagon]

Reminds me of a project idea I had. You'd get a little Raspberry Pi style board with BTLE and battery power (ideally lasting for weeks at a time) and covertly stick it in some communal location, e.g. a cafe or library. Then you'd have it run some local-only forum software and disseminate instructions for connecting to it. The point would be to have a digital community accessible only by direct connection and bound to a physical location by design, kind of in the vein of Community Memory.

It's probably too impractical to work as described, but I think that having a digital space constrained by physical access would be meaningful in a way that internet communities are not. The people you chat with would necessarily be the people in your physical environment, which would make it feel more like a local hangout than the typically vapid social media exchange.

(On further reflection, it would probably be easier to make a mesh network app version of this. Hmm...)

[olyjohn]

I had hoped that by now, people would be educated and tech savvy enough on computers that something like this could be a reality. But these fucking phones and tablets have made people so computer illiterate, there is no hope for something like this working.

Computers run every part of our lives, and it's fucking preposterous that learning the basics of how to operate a computer aren't part of elementary school education. Now it's just "tap app" and look how it's trapped everybody into a world of ignorance.

[Grumbledour]

I had a similar idea a few years ago and tried to set it up, but failed at making it easy to connect to. I wanted the phone to prompt you like when connecting to wifi hotspots where you have to accept some T&Cs before you can connect to the internet, but to then just show you the local services instead of actually offering internet. Honestly, this can't be that difficult, but at the time, I could not get it to work reliably.

[anigbrowl]

This will be about as impactful as printing out the best web articles you encounter and building a shed to shelve them in binders.

[ethbr1]

If you'd like, flip an email my way. We've been thinking similarly.

Email in profile (deref a few times)

[amelius]

You don't need to create a mesh network to start a new internet.

You could also, for instance, develop your own DNS alternative.

[grahamburger]

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.

[shevy-java]

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.

[klysm]

What does a mesh network have to do with this?

[bonesss]

HAM & pirate radio vs corporate broadcasting.

[sevensor]

Hams, by and large, despise pirate radio.