How can a group of volunteers build at least the tech for a replacement for the internet?
I was hoping that each individual user could run and maintain a piece of the infrastructure in a decentralized grassroots way.
How can users build a community owned and maintained replacement for the internet?
I hope that we can have our own servers and mesh/line/tower infrastructure and like wikipedia/internet-archive type organization and user donations based funding.
How could this be realized?
Can this be done with a custom made router that has a stronger wifi that can mesh with other’s of it’s kind? like a city wide mesh? or what are ways to do this?
Edit: this is not meant as a second dark web but more like geocities or the old internet with usermade websites
There’s another project I know of called MaidSafe.
They’re trying to create a decentralized and autonomous mesh Internet (Hardware and all). The biggest challenge of making that work is ensuring there are enough data links, bandwidth and storage space available for the network to operate. And to make that happen, at the end of the day all that hardware, bandwidth and resources need to be paid for. So it also has an internal cryptocurrency to keep track of who is supplying these resources. You can earn this currency by providing storage and connectivity, and you’ll need to spend it to use bandwidth and storage. You can use your own idle PCs to earn this currency throughout the day, but if you don’t want to do that, you can also just buy some at it’s market value to use the network. (Those people using the network without hosting servers are what will give the currency any value, and how the people providing lots of resources will get paid).