First appeared in Ctrl-Zine issue 19: https://ctrl-c.club/~singletona082/zine/2025/Ctrl-ZINE.Issue.19.pdf
Specific Article: gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~singletona082/zine/2025/january.gmi --------------------
##Preamle
==========
This is something I have gone over time and again. First as speculative
iction, then at me simply explaining what I want as an unrestrained end
goal, and on with several other permutations and barely started but now discarded drafts. The advantage of zines, I suppose, is that people
don't expect to be professional and polished. So I will simply do as I
can and let the cards fall as they may.
I was technically there near the start of the home 8 bit micro era. I
became computer aware at the height of the BBS era and saw The Net
(What is now thought of as Web 1.0) take off and balloon. I have seen
the rise of social media and its expansion into essentially becoming
what 'online' represents for large swathes of people. This is a
longhand way of saying I have Seen Things. There are people far wiser
than me that were actively in the trenches, such as xwndows, as
example. I am not claiming a privileged position of technical
knowledge, just a position of having seen the shape of the past and
arrogant enough to believe I have some notion of what might be.
The Short Version; Things Change yet for normies there won't be any
explosive shakeups. For those in the niche hobbies, there are
potentially interesting developments.
##The Normal People and Normal Web
==========
For normal people who only care about facebook, reddit, birdsite, and
youtube? It hasn't really changed. Fine, sure. Names have changed.
Bluesky instead of Twitter (I refuse to call it X, even now,) and
whatever Facebook has rebranded itself to, and Google's third attempt
at a facebook-like platform. To me it just feels like more of the same.
That isn't to say there won't be changes. It's just, these are things
normal people will at best grumble at. The further fragmentation of
streaming services, some streaming services combining, other services
playing ads even for paid accounts. AI is going to go the way of
block-chain. That is to say it may exist in a few niche applications,
but the rampant speculation is going to ... not die in a spectacular
ball of fire, it's going to largely just be a case of most of the
grifters moving on with a few smaller communities still going and
forming a niche of long term users.
The current trends of bending knee to Oligarchs and Overlords will
continue. There will be pushback. The companies at the heart of things
will make token statements or act as if the pushback did something,
then quietly ramp up with kissing the ring after the initial outrage
dies. People have a limited ability to sustain outrage before fatigue
sets in and most normal people didn't care to begin with, so wouldn't
care after the initial incident if they aren't directly affected.
As I am _Not_ one of these normal people? I view this as a negative and
I have ideas. This is not a true solution, nor do I feel it will widely
be attempted. I acknowledge I am going through a fairly major
pessimistic phase in life, so I may be discounting what those that do
not like the Normal Way of Things are willing to do.
##Let's Play a Game
==========
So, will you join me in a game of 'What If?' It will be from the
perspective of a hypothetical Me. A man in his mid forties unable to
drive due to disability and living in a simi rural part of the
south-east United States. I have picked this as our starting point
because as I see it, politically and culturally this is one of the more
hostile to non normal locations in the United States.
----------
Life goes on. The last six years have largely been a case of staying
above water. Family has helped, much to the continued death of my
pride, and I've tried to remain helpful to them in return. Yet in that
time I've noticed for me the internet has largely become something I
interact with sparingly rather than whole heartedly and
enthusiastically embrace as i had in years and decades past. I am not
the only one that has had this falling out of love, or at least feeling
the internet has lost its usefulness.
So while the family checks their latest Facebook anger pit messages
(Hey! What's this 'Federated' business they're doing with Twitter? Are
they like business partners now?) I do my own electronic rounds. There
are services that can be provided through the internet, but aren't some
new social media site, or even Mastodon (Bluesky has federated with a
lot of mastodon sites, though their relative market share is still only
around twenty percent.)
Tildes have been a part of my daily rotation for years, and I've
finally gotten most of my friends to try tilde based services even if
they don't personally use the command line aspects. This has helped not
just in the abstract giving us weird-folk a home that has flown below mainstream attention that it's generally ignored, but given those in marginalized communities a series of communities and services that
arne't getting crowded out by the types that want them to stop
existing.
Hard to stamp out what one does not know exists. Is this ideal? No.
Then again neither was turning the internet into a giant siphon that
keeps people angry and screaming. So we do what we can rather than try dismantling a system built by more money than God has ever seen, tunnel
around the problem.  
That's the heart of the internet after all; treat these things as
network obstructions and route around so the information we want can
flow.
For years, however, my attention hasn't been on the internet properly.
It's taken years, but I'd gotten local groups to start essentially
connecting their home servers up to eachother as a local net. Where I'm
at isn't the kind of rural one sees in the midwest with thousand acre
farms, or as far in the back woods as deep appalachia, but there's
enough space between a lot of these shared servers that maybe one or
two can connect to eachother directly and even then it takes using the
kind of directional antenna setup that generally isn't seen outside of
ham radio.
My home is part of a relay of several of these servers. My folks access
it by browser bookmarks i'dm ade that point them to a neighborhood
landing page that's themed to be very modern social media like as a
sort of hybrid between facebook and twitter. Local events. Memes, and
the like. It gives them a community feel they have long wanted, though
they complain about how slow and or limited it can be when there are
networking hiccups because of whatever, or because a guy three hops
down had to reboot. . Still, it's very modern looking. There's even
video sharing. What they only recently found out when our local ISP had
outages is that the whole thing is completely independent of whether
the internet at large exists or not.
However, for me, the best part isn't even being internet independant.
The high bandwidth video and meme sharing neighborhood servers? That's
just to get the normies on board enough to let me take on my more bold experiments.
It started with Meshtastic, but it is so much more than that base
firmware. Over half a decade to grow and evolve within the constrained
limits of what can be seen as slow dialup speeds at best is
unattractive to normies. Admittedly there are a few instances where my
step dad does appreciate that I'm trying to think of the wider
community (A neighbor about a mile down the road is over a hundred.
Insists on living on his own. So the man has a panic button that isn't
tied to the internet, or his cellphone. Something akin to those medical bracelets that can ping not just us but anyone else within five or so
hops that are set up to retransmiot the alert gives everyone a little
piece of mind that people aren't completely cut off from eachother in
worst case situations.)
I'd set up four BBS nodes through the local cluster. Each of those
nodes existing in weatherproof boxes connected to solar panels, large batteries, and a series of antenna. The setup isn't as cheap as getting
a rak board to talk to one's phone, but the purpose is so much grander.
There are three antennas for each of these nodes. One is an omni
directional antenna. The other two are directional. Each of those are
aimed at very specific nodes along the chain. Each of those targets are
nodes set up by people with similar ideas to me but we only vaguely
know rather than make any plans in the strictest sense.
You see, Mesh has a problem. Same problem Fidonet had in the eighties.
Get more than a hundred or two hundred nodes talking and the routing
overhead takes up most of your avalible message space and sending that information takes up most of your messaging time, thus causing the
network to grind itself to a halt. Unfortunately FIdonet's region
mapping can't be implemented on a one to one basis, as the end users
are often people on the move either in a car or with a little node on a backpack, or even on their wrist. So we had to get clever.
I don't know the specifics. I've always been pants at coding, but I can
share the dumbed down explanation as it was told to me. Ther'es still
that regional system, but the BBS nodes, the mast mounted Repeaters,
the node I've got set up at Cat's Diner (little hole in the wall place
my folks and a lot of other folk like) act as those regional hubs.
They're the static points that act as the constellation all the mobile
nodes use to have an awareness of where they are and how many other
nodes they actually need to pay attention to. So there is this giant
network of LoRa nodes where no single node is aware of everyone else.
THat'd be like me and you walking into Burning Man, or Defcon and both
of us needing to know who Everyone there is so we could talk to each
other.
This set up allows what is a highly regional setup to hook into a wider national set up. All done by hobbyists for the most part, though I
suspect more than a few have sponsorships with hardware manufacturers
wanting to use this Othernet as a testbed to improve and iterate for
actual commercial purposes.It's slow speed, Gods ... Even by Nineties
standards it would've been pretty slow dialup, and with the added issue
of communication outside of your home region not being instant. So no
pulling up AIM like in the old days and having a real time talk with
some girl you thought was cute. The Fidonet comparisons have been made
by more people than me. We'd kinda collectively agreed on Messaging
Hour just like the days of Old. One hour out of each day where data
would propagate across the network. Unlike Ye Olden Days there was
still local traffic, but any requests to reach beyond the five or so
hops of what was around your mesh node to try getting your local BBS to
grab something from a BBS out in ... say ... Minnesota? Delayed until
Messaging Hour was up.
Individual nodes could and often would pass messages laong and sync
faster and more often, but that golden hour was one mandated and held
as a minimum to allow traffic to flow. It was slow, and it frustrated
even a lot of us oldsters that remembered the bad old days, much less
the kids that were raised in full HD with everything at their
fingertips all of the time. Yet there were plenty of kids getting
involved, slowing down, giving us Olds ideas, and help.
Best part about all this? This mesh and the Neighborhood nets were not
two separate things. Fine, fial transfer was very deliberately
disallowed if it wasn't raw text, but the neighborhood net allowed,
even with fancy interfacing, the local BBS, the wider web of what I
thought of as the cronenberg lovechild of ham radio, SMS and Usenet.
It isn't perfect, but considering the negihbrohood net servers could
ingest and hold data from the Normal web as well as anything their
users uploaded as well as allowing us to push our own data onto the
normal web? It was a fun hobbyist experiment that, by and large, self regulated. Bad Stuff did try making its way across, either in
deliberate attempts at trafficking in Bad Things, or in the classic
'hey I don't mean any harm but i want to see what happens if I try
Doing the Thing' and even with encrypted drive space? You would be
amazed and proud of both what people will shrug at and ignore as it
passes on,and what people will take the digital equivalent of a shotgun
to immediately.
Nobody wants to be the reason this goes away. Even with its
imperfections, it gives people a feeling of having a voice in a setting
that both feels very local to where they are, and has enough reach to
get out into the wider world. Ours aren't the only neighborhood
networks either. Sure, can't share data over mesh, but people travel.
When everyone has a computer and storage in their pockets via their
phones, it was a bit of an ask to get those that run the Neighborhood
Net to get people to install apps that dedicated parts of their phone's
drive space to ferry data to and from for the sake of allowing things
to pass from network to network that were just too much for mesh to
handle, but a few brave and insane souls do this.
So, while I would love to feel like the Internet could be reclaimed?
It's been thirty years since the 'Wild West of the Web.' The digital
land has been settled and commodified.
I suppose that makes me and my fellows part of the modern digital
homesteader movement. It isn't much, but it's been enough.
-------------------
Notes:
* I realize my description of how mesh could work isn't wholly accurate
to what Meshtastic provides, but there does seem to be a thing in the
works being promoted by Andy Curby, Meshcore (sadly shares a name with
something wholly unrelated,) that does something similar but not
quite.
* This is grossly oversimplifying what it would take to make a 'modern
Fido' up to and including content moderation, but I wanted to get the
overall feel that 'this can be done. We can find a way around the gunk
that is going on out there,' and focusing on details I am not
mentally capable of formulating answers for won't get people who are
able to work those problems to see that they are solvable.
* I will probably write followup essays demonstrating how I'd like
component pieces to this 'Othernet' to work. Feedback is welcome.
Even if it's just to fling popcorn at my head that at least tells me
you folk read it.
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