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| writing:solarpunk_networks [2025/12/05 16:09] – JacobCoffinWrites | writing:solarpunk_networks [2025/12/05 16:21] (current) – JacobCoffinWrites |
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| ==== Solarpunk Computer/Communication Networks ==== | ==== Solarpunk Computer/Communication Networks ==== |
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| What does the internet look like in the solarpunk future? For a brief while the Internet as we knew it fit pretty well - it contained huge amounts of information, interlinked vast swaths of the human population, and thanks to excellent search engines and indexing, you could learn just about anything you needed to know. There's some argument over whether this golden age even existed or when it happened, but there's fairly broad consensus that the web has gotten worse in recent years. The shape of the place has changed, becoming far more centralized within a few major companies, and even the search engines have deliberately enshittified their products, making it harder to find anything. Then LLMs became easier to operate, worsening an existing problem of bots and fake accounts with a deluge of genuinely incorrect, plausible-looking content search-engine-optimized to float to the top of the results. Between the endless wrong information, the technological boat, the centralized ownership by a handful of terrible people, and increasing government surveillance, its fair to say that a writer preparing a solarpunk setting might look for something else. | What does the internet look like in the solarpunk future? For a brief while the Internet as we knew it fit pretty well - it contained huge amounts of information, interlinked vast swaths of the human population regardless of borders or language, and thanks to excellent search engines and indexing, you could learn just about anything you needed to know. There's some argument over whether this golden age even existed or when it happened, but there's fairly broad consensus that the web has gotten worse in recent years. The shape of the place has changed, becoming far more centralized within a few major companies, and even the search engines have deliberately enshittified their products, making it harder to find anything. Then LLMs became easier to operate, worsening an existing problem of bots and fake accounts with a deluge of genuinely incorrect, plausible-looking content search-engine-optimized to float to the top of the results. Between the endless wrong information, the technological bloat, the centralized ownership by a handful of terrible people, and increasing government surveillance, its fair to say that a writer preparing a solarpunk setting might look for an alternative. |
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| So what does that look like? The easy answer is to look to the web from a decade ago for inspiration, but that's not a full solution because a lot of the flaws just hadn't been exploited yet (and it already had plenty of problems). The modern Fediverse is another answer, and should probably be at least included in the foundational design of any solarpunk internet - it's decentralized by design, moderated largely by the community, it's easy to migrate in and out of, frequently home-hosted, and broadly hardened against the sort of enshittification corporate services inevitably undertake. | So what does that look like? The easy answer is to look to the web from a decade ago for inspiration, but that's not a full solution because a lot of the flaws just hadn't been exploited yet (and it already had plenty of problems). The modern Fediverse is another answer, and should probably be at least included in the foundational design of any solarpunk internet - it's decentralized by design, moderated largely by the community, it's easy to migrate in and out of, frequently home-hosted, and broadly hardened against the sort of enshittification corporate services inevitably undertake. |
| In Meshtastic especially, there's no 'backbone' infrastructure at all. The node you're using to send is both the endpoint for your communications and the backbone for somebody else's. When someone sends a message all the other nodes in range see it and use a preprogrammed logic to decide who re-broadcasts it and who doesn't. To grow the network you need to balance adding more nodes with adding too much traffic. This strikes me as being a risky arrangement (seems like there's only so much bandwidth available, and Metastatic could fail from success if too many people try to use it at once - even though that's how it's supposed to grow. That said, there's a sort of romance in the idea that there's no infrastructure involved but each other - it's a truly democratized sort of system where the cost of using it is enabling others to also use it by relaying their messages. | In Meshtastic especially, there's no 'backbone' infrastructure at all. The node you're using to send is both the endpoint for your communications and the backbone for somebody else's. When someone sends a message all the other nodes in range see it and use a preprogrammed logic to decide who re-broadcasts it and who doesn't. To grow the network you need to balance adding more nodes with adding too much traffic. This strikes me as being a risky arrangement (seems like there's only so much bandwidth available, and Metastatic could fail from success if too many people try to use it at once - even though that's how it's supposed to grow. That said, there's a sort of romance in the idea that there's no infrastructure involved but each other - it's a truly democratized sort of system where the cost of using it is enabling others to also use it by relaying their messages. |
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| [[https://www.instructables.com/Meshtastic-Solar-Buoy/|Here's a neat example of a meshtastic node set up just to hang around extending the network.]] | [[https://www.instructables.com/Meshtastic-Solar-Buoy/|Here's a neat example of a waterproofed, solar-powered meshtastic node set up just to hang around extending the network.]] |
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| Meshcore is also off the grid, but it has a DIY backbone of dedicated repeaters that people set up (often on rooftops and hanging from tall trees). These repeaters are what relay your message and bounce it around until it reaches its destination. The endpoint node ("companion") you carry around and use to text doesn't rebroadcast other people's messages. If you want to grow the network you add more repeaters. This gives Meshcore advocates a pretty concrete goal for building out a mesh - they can buy and rig up hardware and set it up in good locations (LoRa is line-of-sight) in order to make the mesh more effective and usable for more people. Someone in my local mesh is apparently using a quadcopter drone to drop solar-powered repeater nodes into tall trees and the group is pretty active in trying to get access to rooftops with good views. | Meshcore is also off the grid, but it has a DIY backbone of dedicated repeaters that people set up (often on rooftops and hanging from tall trees). These repeaters are what relay your message and bounce it around until it reaches its destination. The endpoint node ("companion") you carry around and use to text doesn't rebroadcast other people's messages. If you want to grow the network you add more repeaters. This gives Meshcore advocates a pretty concrete goal for building out a mesh - they can buy and rig up hardware and set it up in good locations (LoRa is line-of-sight) in order to make the mesh more effective and usable for more people. Someone in my local mesh is apparently using a quadcopter drone to drop solar-powered repeater nodes into tall trees and the group is pretty active in trying to get access to rooftops with good views. |
| === Real life Meshnets === | === Real life Meshnets === |
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| Meshtastic, Meshcore, and Reticulum are real enough, they exist, but modern history has at least a few examples of DIY mesh/street networks that operated without a formal project drafted ahead of time: | Meshtastic, Meshcore, and Reticulum are real enough, they exist, but modern history has at least a few examples of DIY mesh/street networks that operated without a formal project drafted ahead of time. The biggest one I'm aware of was in Cuba: |
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| https://gizmodo.com/cubas-illegal-underground-internet-is-thriving-1681797114 | https://gizmodo.com/cubas-illegal-underground-internet-is-thriving-1681797114 |
| **[[https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-1.gmi|Gemini Protocol]]** | **[[https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-1.gmi|Gemini Protocol]]** |
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| Gemini is a 'text-centric' web alternative designed for people who are stick of how complicated, surveillance-heavy, and generally enshittified the web has gotten. It enables you to set up and view text-based 'capsules' (the local equivalent of a website) and is actually pretty well hardened against adding the kind of new features and bloat which would cause it to follow in the web's footprints. It places an emphasis on reading without distraction, popups, ads, or unnecessary cruft, and allows the user to control how the sites look. It's a good fit for people who have low bandwidth, like simple tech, or appreciate privacy. So while it's not a mesh network, you might see how something so bare-bones might be a good fit for one, given the low requirements on processing power and bandwidth. And there's even an [[https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/860|implementation of Gemini on Reticulum]]! So if you want to get some ideas for what a solarpunk internet might look like, maybe [[https://geminiquickst.art/|wander around Gemini a little]]. | Gemini is a 'text-centric' web alternative designed for people who are stick of how complicated, surveillance-heavy, and generally enshittified the web has gotten. It enables you to set up and view text-based 'capsules' (the local equivalent of a website) and is actually pretty well hardened against adding the kind of new features and bloat which would cause it to follow in the web's footprints. It places an emphasis on reading without distraction, popups, ads, or unnecessary cruft, and allows the user to control how the sites look. It's a good fit for people who have low bandwidth, like simple tech, or appreciate privacy (it's encrypted by default). So while it's not a mesh network, you might see how something so bare-bones might be a good fit for one, given the low requirements on processing power and bandwidth. And there's even an [[https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/860|implementation of Gemini on Reticulum]]! So if you want to get some ideas for what a solarpunk internet might look like, maybe [[https://geminiquickst.art/|wander around Gemini a little]]. |
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