Self hosting helps make the internet more decentralized, but at the end of the day someone else owns that series of tubes.
This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cool if we self hosted not just servers but networking infrastructure as well.
I have an extra class amateur radio license and one of the many niches within the ham radio hobby I’m interested in is packet radio and wireless mesh networking.
Packet radio could technically refer to any RF communication that uses packets, including wifi, but I mostly see it used to refer to the AX.25 protocol, which works like an old-school dial-up modem in that it converts data into audio tones that are transmitted using FM or single sideband radios built for voice communication. AX.25 is used mostly nowadays in Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) which is used to report location and status info. There’s a website, aprs.fi, where you can track vehicles sending their location or weather stations reporting conditions and so on.
In the olden days there were tons of bulletin boards hosted over AX.25 all over the globe that you could reach either directly or through repeaters. There are a few hangers on, and I even hosted one for a while but nobody visited. You could by hardware terminal node controllers (TNCs) that had a BBS feature, and nowadays there are a few software TNCs available.
Several Wifi frequency bands overlap with ham bands, and various projects have arisen that modify commercial wifi gear to turn them into mesh nodes forming a wireless wide area network, operating under FCC part 97 rules rather than the unlicensed part 15 rules that they use out of the box. This allows higher power and channels otherwise off limits to wifi stations. The project I’m most familiar with is Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) which uses a fork of openWRT firmware. I’ve tried a couple times to get the other hams in my area interested in setting up a network, but it’s slow going.
There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I’m not as familiar with.
This barely scratches the surface of what’s out there. The ham bands are explicitly non commercial and there are limits on what you can transmit and how much bandwidth you can use, but I dream of a day when everyone’s wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we’d be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.
There’s not really too much of a debate, just a lack of deep understanding of how the infrastructure works under the hood.
The other person (rightly) doesn’t want to share their local network (what’s behind your wifi router) with their neighbors. My only point was that, much like current ISPs, you don’t share any networking with your neighbors. The only thing remotely close to ‘shared’ would be the individual uplinks (your ISP connection) from each residence to the (shared) networking gear of the ISP.
A local ISP and a Telco aren’t (shouldn’t) going to be handling the base networking layer any differently. They’ll all have individual connections between them and subscribers, and the only way that I could get into your network is to setup services and configure either side to talk to the service on the other.
To actually ELI5 (which I am exceptionally bad at with actual 5yos), Alice and Bob both get their toys from Charles (Telco ISP) who charges a lot of money, and doesn’t treat them well when they try to use the toys they got. Dan comes a long and works with Ed and Fred to set up a local toy store and try to treat customers better. Bob (irmadlad) is concerned that the new local toy store means he’ll have to share the toys he bought with Alice, not realizing neither store makes you share your toys.