[scrappyjoe]

I set up a little neighbourhood pbx this year on an oracle cloud always free instance. Took a couple of days.

Any family can buy a WiFi-enabled office phone and I’ll set up an extension for them. It’s working great! My six year old had a 15 minute chat with classmate while we were making dinner today; they have arranged a play date for next Monday.

A couple of weeks ago a 5 year old invented prank calls. Every now and then the phone will ring and we’ll pick up and she’ll sing a a couple of lines out of Frozen before hanging up. It’s made our community much closer.

[stronglikedan]

Sadly, all the busybodies in my community would make this unbearable, since they'd have direct lines to people instead of having to wait to see them outside to complain to them.

[jagged-chisel]

I mean, you’re not required to answer. Nor to have the ringer on. Nor to have the phone active …

[bitwize]

Well it beats asking for Amanda Hugankiss.

That's really cool. Recently I had the fantasy of setting up a PBX here in the house and bringing back "dial up internet" for me and my wife, as a doomscrolling mitigation measure. Probably won't work though, as we each have smartphones plus she wants her streamers to play back full-fat 4K.

[jon-wood]

You could absolutely set up some traffic shaping on a router which drops social media sites down to 56kbps while allowing Netflix to use as much bandwidth as it needs to stream in 4K.

[picofarad]

CenturyLink started on somebody's porch.

The original party line was tied together with barbed wire fencing between farms.

I also run a PBX.

and a PBX behind a VPN firewall.

[patrickdavey]

Can you point to an article on how to do this? This sounds _amazing_

[scrappyjoe]

Here’s my ansible playbook if you want to give it a go.

https://github.com/riazarbi/homephone