We have meshtastic, which is a mesh network for radio communications. How can we create something like that for the internet? And, ideally, how do we then host the fediverse platforms on it?
The internet is a mesh network already.
Well how do we make it even more meshy
My home networking closet is quite a mesh already :(
We said mesh not mess
Yesh and it is.
How about a message transport protocol that’s simple?
Why not both?
Let’s call it SMTP for short.
Get an Autonomous System Number (ASN) then set up some physical links with other people/companies/universities/etc
Our 200km run of fibre isn’t the only one where losing it will take us offline like what happened in 2012 with the striking railway guy hacking at a trunk box in the wilderness with an axe.
No. We had redundancy. A whole other company who, when they got bought by a third party, consolidated their links for efficiency and located our backup run right alongside the primary one so it got hit with the same axe in the next chop.
To be fair, there were a LOT of fibre runs on that route, so a lot of us tanked that afternoon.
But that’s not very meshy.
The thing is, the Internet routing protocol BGP delivers basically everything that a mesh network requires, except for the physical data links that carry the data. Keeping things short, BGP is a way to declare where certain IP addresses can be found. So an example announcement BGP would be something like “2608:120::/32 can be found at AS721”, where AS stands for Autonomous Network, a subnetwork that is controlled by a single entity. In this case, that IPv6 range belongs to the USA Department of Defense (DoD) and AS721 is the identifier for their network.
Now, the trick is to figure out how your own AS can reach the AS of your destination, which is no different than a mesh: the DoD’s AS721 is solely connected to AS3356 (the massive ISP named “Level 3”), which is a very likely connected to the upstream AS of your link to the Internet, which means there is a valid path from your AS to the DoD.
Whenever an intermediate AS disappears from the global Internet, its former peers will reroute through other links to maintain a path to the largest number of AS’s (as in, the Internet). In this sense, having multiple links to different AS’s is important for redundancy, and is no different than a mesh network having multiple RF paths.
Finally, if multiple link failures occur – say, a Tier 1 ISP goes completely down – then the network becomes fragmented, but traffic within each fragment will still pass. This is akin to a mesh between two cities, where the mountain-top repeater is struck by lightning. Locals in each town can still send messages, but not over the hill to the next town.
Is BGP perfect? Heavens no. And it has its own issues with maliciously-crafted announcements. But everything that BGP does is analogous to what mesh networks do. It’s merely that the participants are highly commercialized today, whereas in the 80s, it was mostly universities and a few defense contractors experimenting.
The technology is basically here, but it’s how it gets used that will dictate out how history will be written.
Take a look at a project called reticulum.
This looks very cool. Would it be possible to run eg a Mastodon instance on reticulum?
I’m afraid I don’t know much about it. I’m just beginning to learn about these kinds of alternative networks.
Not really possible, you could do intranets but once you reach really long ranges (such as overseas, or even large unhabitable areas) any radio solution is going to be either really slow or really unreliable or both (and any physical infrastructure needs an owner to fund it and maintain it, coming back to ISPs)
Imo, in an ideal situation, the internet should be made of mesh intranets that are about city wide, and ISPs would be the ones connecting between these intranets, keeping the best of both worlds while also supporting and encouraging local services which would provide local economical growth on top of the advantage of federated infrastructure and local privacy laws.
Imagine every household has a router that instead of connecting to an ISP, is connected to a mesh network with all of the neighbors, and in each neighborhood there would be an ISP router that would act as the gateway to the internet. Anyone can freely join any intranet, while ISP connections would be paid (preferably by some sort of local authority and not per household) and just like today, anyone who has special infra needs can connect directly to the ISP by making an account.
This is an interesting idea. It would also help give the internet a more local focus, which I think is something missing in today’s internet. It’s part of why local news is struggling so much right now
You don’t the bandwidth is too low it would be more a bbs.
Whats a bbs?
Oh god I’m old.
It’s, it’s basically a forum. A Bulletin Board System. Back from the days where you measured your bandwidth in baud.
Reject modernity, return to bbs
Yep we are really old. Note: there are still some BBS’s still online today on the tildeverse.
Bulletin Board System. Imagine if you had to connect to each Lemmy instance individually to read the collected posts. That’s sort of what BBSes were. A person’s computer hosting a forum of posts, that you’d connect through their phone number. The new use of that term with mesh is I think the same idea, individual connections and not a broad one like the internet is.
Yea but it would be fine for the important shit like news, weather, alerts. Especially for neighborhood mesh alert systems.
Yeah only issue is if everyone was checking or posting their own updates through the mesh it would get bogged down with collisions. But that might improve if there more devices in a given area. Right now you have Bottleneck’s where there is only one link between 2 groups nodes.
Do you mean through radio waves like APRS, 10m BBS, or HAMNET? Interent though peer to peer like Freenet (Hyphanet)? Or solely through Mesh like MeshBBS?
I think the issue with running through Mesh is bandwith and range. Look how “limited” APRS or 10m BBS is (I know FCC band requirements and what not)
Do you mean through radio waves like APRS, 10m BBS, or HAMNET? Interent though peer to peer like Freenet (Hyphanet)? Or solely through Mesh like MeshBBS?
Well, I don’t know what the details would look like. I was hoping the good people of lemmy could help me out with that
I guess how would be the source of transmission be? All of those I listed have sort of a mesh/peer to peer community. The difference is inoperability.
With 10m BBS i can get really far due to antenna and how large the radio wave is. On the flipside Meshtastic (which is 915 mhz US band and 400 in Euro I believe) has a tiny antenna, way less range,however you have less interference from other stations or space weather.
With conventional internet (cable, dial up, satilite) we have peer to peer, which is close to mesh networking (freenet, torrants, file sharing sites, Zeronet).
I’m only scratching the surface here.
On the flipside Meshtastic (which is 915 mhz US band and 400 in Euro I believe) has a tiny antenna, way less range,however you have less interference from other stations or space weather.
Meshtastic seems to only support text messaging. Is that due to a limitation on the frequency it uses?
Ish. Frequency dictates bandwidth (this is a very basic statement), and meshtastic is low bandwidth. This means you can still send any amount of data you like, just like in the old days of the internet, but the more there is, the longer it takes. So meshtastic is fine for text, but would require an amazing amount of buffering to be able to send video.
So in the US, mesh is on the ISM 902-928 mhz band and is unlicensed. It has both a power and bandwidth restriction (26mhz) compaired other mode to prevent harmful interference to other users.
We can look at CB Single Sideband (SSB) that you can split the audio into two different “sides” and have operators transmiting on upper and lower without interfering with another.
Tl;dr too nerdy: Techincally yes, you can use voice over mesh and a lot of amateur radio operators transmit voice over 900 into the giga bands sucessfully. All Meshtastic is, is a two way radio.
I believe the reason it’s only text based is due to collision. Irrc last year’s Ham Fest Mesh crashed due to too many users on the “network”. It’s been patched since then and everyone uses (mid short? I cant remember atm) a different mode now.
