Self hosting helps make the internet more decentralized, but at the end of the day someone else owns that series of tubes.
This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cool if we self hosted not just servers but networking infrastructure as well.
I have an extra class amateur radio license and one of the many niches within the ham radio hobby I’m interested in is packet radio and wireless mesh networking.
Packet radio could technically refer to any RF communication that uses packets, including wifi, but I mostly see it used to refer to the AX.25 protocol, which works like an old-school dial-up modem in that it converts data into audio tones that are transmitted using FM or single sideband radios built for voice communication. AX.25 is used mostly nowadays in Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) which is used to report location and status info. There’s a website, aprs.fi, where you can track vehicles sending their location or weather stations reporting conditions and so on.
In the olden days there were tons of bulletin boards hosted over AX.25 all over the globe that you could reach either directly or through repeaters. There are a few hangers on, and I even hosted one for a while but nobody visited. You could by hardware terminal node controllers (TNCs) that had a BBS feature, and nowadays there are a few software TNCs available.
Several Wifi frequency bands overlap with ham bands, and various projects have arisen that modify commercial wifi gear to turn them into mesh nodes forming a wireless wide area network, operating under FCC part 97 rules rather than the unlicensed part 15 rules that they use out of the box. This allows higher power and channels otherwise off limits to wifi stations. The project I’m most familiar with is Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) which uses a fork of openWRT firmware. I’ve tried a couple times to get the other hams in my area interested in setting up a network, but it’s slow going.
There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I’m not as familiar with.
This barely scratches the surface of what’s out there. The ham bands are explicitly non commercial and there are limits on what you can transmit and how much bandwidth you can use, 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.
Well, the biggest reason I could think of is that you want to access the Internet.
Your local network is only as good as the services you run, and most people don’t self host. If you choose not to hook your uplink to your ISPs network, you’re not gonna be able to do all that much.
From the OP (emphasis mine):
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.
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.
Can someone give me a “explain to me like I’m five” to the debate here? I’d like to learn 😀
This is an example of what an Internet service providers network might look like.
They use many different types of specialized computers and devices to connect your house (one of the grey rectangles) to the greater Internet (the yellow rectangle in the middle).
One person is arguing that instead of the Internet service provider owning all of the red green and blue computers… Other people would own them. And maybe the red computer for your neighborhood would physically be inside your neighbor’s house, instead of in a small building or box on the side of the road somewhere nearby.
Functionally, it’s the same Internet, regardless of who owns the red box. Though theoretically, it could be less safe to give random people, potentially bad actors, access to the physical computer that is the red box, because they could do something malicious with it. But the point is, if the technology is working correctly, it doesn’t matter who owns it, everyone’s private home networks (everything downstream of your grey rectangle), are kept separate.
Just like normal Internet, you can’t print on your neighbor’s network printer, just because you both have the same ISP and share the same red computer upstream somewhere. The red computer won’t let it happen.
Does that make sense?
Now, the concern of the other guy, it seems, comes from not understanding this. Not understanding that the red computers are specially configured by the ISP, or whoever owns it, to keep the grey rectangles separate.
What he might be thinking, is something similar to sharing your Wi-Fi password. Or maybe running an Ethernet cable over the fence and plugging your neighbor’s router into your router. Things start to get complicated here, so I’ll gloss over a lot of things, but essentially… Your home router is not configured like the red computers are. So all of your neighbors data would be going through your home network, and you could very likely see what he’s doing, and he could potentially see what you’re doing (provided there’s no double NAT, but even then I’m not sure, maybe).
Basically, if two or more neighbors want to share Internet, but don’t know how to do it safely, then they can expose their private network activity to each other and open each other up to a decent amount of risk.
The solution, is to configure your router in a similar way to the red computers. It’s complicated, but not that difficult in practice. You could Google VLANs to get an idea of what would need to be done. Honestly you’d need more than that, some good firewall rules, and more things that I’m not qualified to comment on. I’m not a networkologist. But it can be done.
The debate/argument stems from a basic misunderstanding of how these systems work. Or perhaps they both understand how they work, but the guy who doesn’t want to do it is just worried about his neighbors being untrustworthy with the hardware being in their house, worried they’ll be nefarious, but he’s just bad at communicating that idea to the other guy.
At any rate, it doesn’t matter who owns the red computers or the green or blue, if they’re configured correctly, you’re safe. Unless you don’t trust whoever owns the computers 🤷♂️
Hopefully that makes sense! Let me know if you have any questions!
There’s not really too much of a debate, just a lack of deep understanding of how the infrastructure works under the hood.
The other person (rightly) doesn’t want to share their local network (what’s behind your wifi router) with their neighbors. My only point was that, much like current ISPs, you don’t share any networking with your neighbors. The only thing remotely close to ‘shared’ would be the individual uplinks (your ISP connection) from each residence to the (shared) networking gear of the ISP.
A local ISP and a Telco aren’t (shouldn’t) going to be handling the base networking layer any differently. They’ll all have individual connections between them and subscribers, and the only way that I could get into your network is to setup services and configure either side to talk to the service on the other.
To actually ELI5 (which I am exceptionally bad at with actual 5yos), Alice and Bob both get their toys from Charles (Telco ISP) who charges a lot of money, and doesn’t treat them well when they try to use the toys they got. Dan comes a long and works with Ed and Fred to set up a local toy store and try to treat customers better. Bob (irmadlad) is concerned that the new local toy store means he’ll have to share the toys he bought with Alice, not realizing neither store makes you share your toys.