I had just driven passed a burger joint that was built on the site of, and using the facade of, a building from the 1700s, and it stirred up a bunch of memories and feelings about a project I've been thinking about and working on.
But it's a long meandering thing, the kind of thread that, while I am obviously talking about something takes a long time to get there.
With the technology that is available today, we can build a network that spans a neighborhood wirelessly, without infrastructure.
We can adjoin nearby neighborhoods with nothing more than the thoughtful placement of an antenna (and a radio, of course, and perhaps a solar panel and battery if required for the thoughtful placement.)
We can easily cover our small town. I'm betting we can do it with 3 nodes, but it might take as many as six. That's fine, every participant can be a range extender (and vice versa).
We can cover our community with a free to access network, all you need is a radio, and we should be able to build those for $30 or less.
But, of course, these are incredibly low bandwidth connections. Hayes modem low. Kansas city standard slow.
That's why I started rambling about Community Memory in the other thread. It ran on a connection that could only transmit 10 symbols per second and, for a time, didn't even have a monitor attached (it was accessed via teletype.)
The network from which I am drawing my inspiration (any my radios) is designed only for texting. It can do this well enough, and I believe we can build the rest of our stack on top of a "text message" packet.
But I'm trying to thread a needle between what is possible with the existing technologies, and what is desirable.
What should such a network provide? What must it provide? What shouldn't it provide?
What value can be found in such a network?
If we follow the Community Memory model, with a couple of dedicated terminals set up, it could help people understand what the network is, and why they might want to use it. Getting folks online from their own hardware is just a matter of making the hardware available and keeping an up to date coverage map.
@ajroach42@drwho Like, outfitting the town with its own mesh WiFi, plus cell signal (using last gen / cheap, surplus hardware) as a stretch goal?
FidoNet was a pretty awesome post office protocol, maybe mid-distance inter-town comms would be routed via microwave and long-distance via packet radio?
Gosh, this “greenfield a lotek internet” design project sounds fun 🤩
@cmdrmoto@drwho I'm looking at starting with meshtastic/LoRa nodes. 900Mhz.
We're going to be dealing with bandwidth in the sub 1kbps range.
The plan for longer range connections, at the moment, is a combination of 1) store and forward from clients as they travel between networks 2) sneakernet/out of band comms.
@ajroach42 On that note, I recall our conversation some months ago on how to make our container vessel more immediately useful. You'll be pleased to know that I'm a few weeks away from wrapping up a CLI for it.
If you have some kind of store-and-forward capability (and sneakernet is the ultimate version of that), then it's useful to have an abstraction between the forwarding medium and the application concerns, and that is pretty much what this container is.
@ajroach42@drwho Neat! I don’t know as much about that stuff as I’d like, but one of my design goals for our next internet is to allow for graceful degradation from higher- to lower-sophistication devices.
I anticipate the institutional capital and knowledge to make 3nm silicon will not be widely accessible after a civilizational collapse, and i think there will come a time when early-21st-century devices are both the most sophisticated and least useful.
@ajroach42@drwho Anyway. Packet radio is pretty neat and appears to be lowtek enough that modern-skilled hobbyists could conceivably construct an entire rig from relatively poor-toleranced parts. But of course it’s decidedly spectrum-constrained.
No idea how all this tek level stuff translates to LoRa; that’s outside my knowledge base at the moment
@ajroach42@drwho Least useful, because capitalists keep turning our devices into lease-like arrangements and those encrypted things will be tamper-proof.
Most sophisticated, because corporations will stop at nothing to create an artificially scarce resource which they can maintain exclusive control over.
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