Comment on The cloud is just someone else's computer, but the internet is just someone else's network
irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 day agoFrom the OP (emphasis mine):
but I dream of a day when everyone’s wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we’d be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.
I already hook my uplink to a network called my ISP. It’s fast, it delivers everything I need, that’s why I pay for it. Why would I want to hook my uplink to BillyBob’s network a mile up or down the road either way? Now, I realize there is no ‘I’ in team, but there is a big ass ‘ME’, so the idea first has to pass the ‘me’ test as selfish as that may sound. Reduced speeds don’t sound like a selling point, at least to me. Communal communications doesn’t sound like a selling point, at least to me.
Yes, I get it. At this point, 80%+ of 8.4 billion people are inexorably tied together via the internet, no matter what ISP you use. However, the current system delivers fast speeds and access to more data than I could consume in many lifetimes. So, I’m still left struggling with the ‘why’ part.
So, if you would, help me out with the ‘why’ part.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It eliminates a single point of failure, can be used to bypass censorship, and allow for community support/engagement in a way that is harder to track and suppress (in that there’s no ‘central’ hub and you have to go after nodes individually. From an opsec point of view, you’re still broadcasting a signal that someone in range can pick up). Obviously it requires many devices to make a good mesh work, but short of DOSing every channel or just blowing out the signal space, it’s gonna be hard to take that down.
I see it as something like tor or i2p, not something for general use at the moment, but definitely has good uses.