Post #4344432

2026-08-02 21:41 UTC

This will likely be incoherent. The beginnings of ideas, hopefully some of which will resonate with someone and we can grow it from there. Starlink is convenient, but every time I see it mentioned I can't help but think of the evilness of Elon Musk and how close we are to Kessler Syndrome thanks to the irresponsible mismanagement of orbit (h/t @sundogplanets@mastodon.social ). We have the technology to improve terrestrial networks in traditionally less connected places. It would take work. We would probably need to change the way a lot of people think about the Internet. My first ISP was a volunteer-run rack of dial-up modems colocated at the local university. It was a community effort. We could build community owned networks again. I think. For all I know it's been made illegal in service of capitalism. But from a technical standpoint it's a matter of deploying gear and educating people. Some of these new networks may not look pretty compared to what we're used to, but dangit they'd work. I have some of this knowledge locked up in my noggin' that I'd love to share with people. I don't know how to power past the inertia though. We seem to be locked into this notion that Big Corporations are the only ones who can save us. Can we really start over and build a compassionate network for the people, or is everything we have going to rot?

Replies (1)

@djsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology 2026-08-02 22:02

@nivex@tenforward.social back when we lived in a small coastal farming town in northern California, over the mountains from Silicon Valley, one of the residents was a guy named Steve. He lived across the street from us. He worked tech in the valley, but had to drive 1-1.5 hrs in the long way to go to the office because we had no internet in town yet; the telco’s profitability formula wasn’t triggered by the sparse sub-1k population. So Steve took a low-five-figure chunk of that tech income and gave it to the telco to drag commercial fiber to his house. He then put up an antenna mast in the backyard and announced his point-to-point wireless ISP serving the town and surroundings, priced at cost of the transit that month divided across the subscriber base. He ended up with a few more antenna masts spread around the area to service mostly-line-of-sight customers near there, and a lot of years he’d send out an email letting everyone know that the last couple months of the year were free because of overages and stuff (or so he claimed; I always suspected Steve was doing it as a holiday gift to the families in town that were by and large very underprivileged compared to his family). Eventually Comcast figured out that they couldn’t afford to not secure the customer base in this little area, once he’d established that there was one, and they swooped in with trucks and wired the town for coax quick fast. But Steve kept running his thing, at least as long as we lived there. Provided email and web hosting space for each account, too, and would absolutely jump through hoops for my shenanigans along the way. Had it been an incorporated township or what have you he’d probably have been stopped by some commission or another, but as we fell under the county and had 0.05% of the population of the county, the county commissioners barely paid us any attention at all unless we were bugging them about something (road washed out three weeks ago, y’all, uh) Better ways are possible, parallel systems can be built, but someone’s gotta be doing the infra building and someone’s gotta be doing the social building and those someone’s have gotta have plans to keep it all going. It is absolutely doable though.

Open ##4344430