Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience!
A Feedly with Friends! (does this already exist?)
Basically a follow-based social graph on top of the excellent feedly experience. So there's a "Social" tab, a timeline of sorts, with things like:
"Your friend just read 'Some Cool Article Title' from 'That publication'"
"X commented on Y: ... "
"X1, X2, X3 subscribed to 'Some Publication Making The Rounds'"
Call it Socialfeeds or Feedbook or something. Bootstrap over twitter/fb social graphs.
Back in the day of google reader I remember there were some basic social features (hope these are not false memories...) and I actually really enjoyed them because of course I want to discuss all the cool shit I'm reading with my friends!
It was sorta rhetorical to make a point about 'internet' meaning just interconnected networks :D And any wireless mesh based network will face the same issue (my reply was mainly about FUD against CJDNS, and some implication that http://altheamesh.com/ is superior because ????)
But anyway, access to the commercial internet and sending data over the transatlantic obviously need "normal" ISPs, but as others have noted below (replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16135626) that's not the "big issue".
One final note, I personally prefer networks where the incentive to support the network is simply because the members want to see it succeed (mutual benefit all around), not because each node wants to accumulate cryptocurrency.
And it seems to be working just fine without cryptocurrency being involved. Call me naive but I think it's possible to motivate people without money.
This was my first ever look at mesh networks, years ago!! Met a bunch of people hacking on it in c-base. Those guys are awesome! And my go-to example for large successful installations of CJDNS over wireless mesh (40k+ nodes AFAIK!). Also I'm under the impression that Freifunk consider themselves part of Hyperboria, but I'm not so sure actually...
Cool project (altheamesh.com) but please don't spread FUD about CJDNS...
What do you mean by "internet access"? If you mean access to the "commercial internet" then I assure you a lot of CJDNS peers provide gateways to the "clearnet", as they like to call it, and traffic gets routed to it when needed.
A lot of the nodes are connected over existing infrastructure because infrastructure is hard; but yet there are already several dozens of thousands of wireless mesh nodes running CJDNS. For one example of a network (that is not over existing ISPs): https://www.freifunk-karte.de/ and I'm sure you can google for more. The CJDNS project clearly promotes setting up wireless mesh over going with your existing infra.
I believe the flexibility to be part overlay part independent at the same time is a powerful boon to the project actually. Perhaps that's why there are 100s of thousands of CJDNS nodes around the globe?
Regarding routing, CJDNS uses "source routing" which has various advantages. All the satisfied nodes running CJDNS don't seem to be complaining about the routing efficiency.... BATMAN is superior when nodes are actually changing location (i.e. mobile mesh networks), which is not the intended use-case here (CJDNS nodes are at fixed locations and peering connectiongs are set up manually by exchanging keys out-of-band). Also BATMAN is only a routing protocol whereas CJDNS does address allocation and cryptographic peer auth as well, and the routing protocol can actually be changed anyway.
Community-owned does not necessarily mean govt owned: look at peer-to-peer mesh networks (https://hyperboria.net/). Private citizens run their own nodes and connect to the nodes near them (and potentially help their neighbours by hooking them up and so on). The community members literally own the infrastructure; not through the abstraction of government.
They have incentive to keep things running well and efficiently because well it's you and your friends and neighbours!
I would be very interested to hear more about your experience dboreham! I'm assuming you mean you ran a small/local ISP and it was an overall loss?
What do you think of something like Hyperboria (https://hyperboria.net/) which is based on CJDNS, so there's no "ISP" really, but each peer sort of is a very small very local service provider to whoever they decide to peer with.
I was imagining some peers will charge other peers money to act as their gateway to the public network. Or maybe a bunch of people will pool their money and buy commercial network access
Which is why we should be scrambling to get it done now. Free and non-centrally-controllable access to connectivity is going to be a powerful aide in all the other battles.
Priorities priorities priorities.
Andre Staltz gives[1] an approximate deadline of 5-10 years, or we're doomed.
As a side note, it always bothered me how terribly inefficient it is to be sending data in circles around the world just to message someone two streets down or, worse, my house mate in the other room......
The decentralized future is going to be a lot more efficient, a lot more reliable, and even faster.
We'll still need big orgs to take care of those undersea cables, for now at least; but even with that still out of reach for hobbyists or community projects, the situation can already be much better than what is being forced on us.
On another note, if you are using p2p tech like scuttlebutt and DAT[1] and Beaker[2] browser then just having good neighbourhood and city wide meshes will already be a YUUUGE boon :D since they share data locally, and for a lot of uses you don't really need access to servers across the oceans
We can easily be running our own internet. I recenlty discovered CJDNS[1] (protocol for encrypted p2p address allocation and routing for mesh networks, so essentially OSI layer 3) and project Hyperboria[2] (a community of local WiFi initiatives) while exploring scuttlebutt[3]. Confirmed my suspicions that we could probably be getting waaay better internet connectivity at way lower prices.
Decentralized tech is going to be the future. Now if we can only figure out how to not get squashed down by the powers that be.
Ad based revenue models are based on selling user data. I think in the p2p world these services would start charging money for the actual service instead. For example, one would pay for access to the world's best search engine that has indexed all there is to index in the public parts of the p2p world; as opposed to accessing it for "free" (in which case the user is actually what is being "sold", to the advertisers)
And it's open source!
Thanks for the tip frumiousirc!