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Are there any mesh networks people use as an alternative to the regular internet? E.g. there's yggdrasil which I played around with a bit but I don't know how to go from that to a physical network. Are there special routers that one would need to get enough signal strength? More generally what do you think the future of the internet will look like? There are a bunch of crypto projects trying to incentivize running nodes for either mesh networks or vpn / tor like services or for file sharing so as to decentralize internet infrastructure. But I can't really imagine these solving the economics well enough to be both profitable for those providing the infrastructure while being cheap enough to pay without it centralizing again into several ISPs and cloud services. One idea I had was to implement such stuff, say for example seeding torrents, with a token that can only be used by the same network identity. So when you first run the program it generates a unique identifier, then when you seed a torrent for X bytes you can utilise the same network also for X bytes, but you cannot transfer this token to another identity so no buying and selling. Then it would force the network to decentralize and incentivize only those who would actually contribute to it but without them feeling like they are buying into some pump and dump scheme. (Details would have to vary a bit to actually get people to use it in the first place. Something like when you first make an identifier it slowly accumulates tokens proportional to some small fraction of the unused capacity of the network.) Thanks for reading my blog.

https://reticulum.network > Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth. > The vision of Reticulum is to allow anyone to operate their own sovereign communication networks, and to make it cheap and easy to cover vast areas with a myriad of independent, interconnectable and autonomous networks.

I heard yggdrasil over i2p is the killer app

>>79827 >I heard yggdrasil over i2p is the killer app Why do I need yggdrasil if I already have i2p?

First of all, maybe the core idea of meshnets is "wrong", maybe it's like power generation where there's too much waste (time, power/fuel efficiency, hardware) in everyone running their little generator vs a single monster power plant serving a city. Why no community-based meshnets (as a novelty at least), why no competently and transparently operated centralized ISPs with fair pricing? Because we're all utterly retarded monkeys. People don't have the capacity or interest to understand why or how the Internet works, they just care about tapping the Facebook, TikTok, YouTube icon on their phone. Nobody uses niche websites like this one, nobody uses quality alternative software, even if it's objectively better for their usecase. We can't expect ignorant and convenience-driven people to build a new Internet. As long as ISPs don't do something egregious like charging $500 a month or censoring dopamine spiking services, everyone will happily buy centralized bandwidth and not give a damn. If you hand customers wireless black boxes then you could have a meshnet of sorts, but if they can't independently configure, understand, build, hack their boxes, if they expect an authority to manage it instead, that's just a less effective centralized ISP, not a decentralized community network. Would need antennas too, look at what the masses thought about 5G antennas. Nerds who care are unfortunately too far apart to operate a large-scale independent physical mesh network. Therefore it makes more sense to use the regular Internet (as long as the IP layer remains free) or overlay networks. Yggdrasil is an alpha protocol that could be used to build a meshnet (or any net), but it's not deployed except for the proof-of-concept Internet-based overlay which is redundant and pointless other than research and testing. >crypto projects trying to incentivize running nodes These look encouraging on the surface, but I'm afraid they're all ponzis, trying to justify the existence of their crypto tokens and prop up the price, so the founders and investors can get rich quick by dumping their tokens over a few years (which they themselves printed). That's why non-crypto companies don't do it, it's not sustainable or profitable. >when you seed a torrent for X bytes you can utilize the same network also for X bytes, but you cannot transfer this token There is an experiment for this, private torrent trackers without a bonus system, based strictly on upload and download. Notably "Redacted", the music tracker. It's a restrictive environment and miserable for a normal person, even though new users are allowed to dip well under 1:1 ratio to help them get started. It takes time and money to get any upload credit. Those who earned some upload can hesitate to spend it because it's so precious. Hard to get credits is supposedly the point, it should incentivize content retention. I don't know if there are any stats to back that theory up. In contrast, trackers that are not as strict or ratioless have much more activity and still feel like they have okay retention. It'd be nice to see a scientific retention study across strict and open torrent trackers. In a truly decentralized setting with no admins to intervene, I can see a large entity mass seeding for tokens and selling download shares to small users at a markup, in effect becoming a cloud provider. >>79827 I believe it's the other way around, running I2P (the Tor-like anonymizer overlay network) over the Yggdrasil demo network (which is a simulation of a 2nd public Internet). I don't fully understand why this has to be a feature in i2pd, as Yggdrasil hands you an IPv6 address and I2P works fine over IPv6. Maybe it's that Yggdrasil is a whole new Internet and the same IPv6 address can refer to two different targets, one on the normal Internet and another on Yggdrasil, and i2pd wants to work over both Internets for some reason. I also don't get why some experimental tech demo with no real life deployments is integrated into a production I2P client. Then again, this is the same dev who's hellbent on including the obscure half broken Russian GOST cipher in his node. Either schizo or has good reasons that remain unexplained. >>79830 Yeah, Yggdrasil doesn't offer any upsides to I2P. Devs are so confident about I2P's anonymity guarantees that they derezzed connecting to I2P from Tor, saying connecting from clearnet should be fine, let's not waste Tor bandwidth. (Funny thing is they only derezzed Tor IPv4 exits, Tor IPv6 exits still work and can't be derezzed because there's too many of them.) Yggdrasil is just another public Internet. It's more about compatibility, like how I2P supports IPv4 transports and also IPv6. Well it also supports Yggdrasil IPv6, a third way for I2P nodes to talk to each other.

>>79834 Good points. Power generation doesn't seem so clearly in favor of centralization now that solar panels are more affordable. This is probably mostly due to land (surface area) being expensive so it becomes more economical to use ones roof, with a minor contribution from being able to save on connecting to the electrical network for more remote regions or reducing loss from power transfer. There is little chance a mesh network will improve remote coverage now that starlink exists. The only situation I see them becoming used is under adverserial conditions where the government is trying to shut down encryption and mixnets thus making the larger number of routes through the network useful. You are right in that there doesn't seem to be any succesful example of micropayments... The most succesful projects or companies seem to be either quite open and free (eg linux, seeding torrents), reliant on advertising and surveillance, or subscription based. Which sounds a bit strange to me given how much credit people give to markets being good at solving resource and capital allocation problems.

>>79751 Maybe PeerlX/dn42 is interesting for you