I don’t think it’s necessarily escaping places like the Fediverse, but the internet as it exists… I don’t know if there’s a way to “heal” it or stop it from getting worse, honestly. So I very much feel like there’s opportunity for people to “disconnect” while also being somewhat connected. Local websites tailored to community needs as opposed to corporate ones.

I mean, if “Big Tech Won’t Broadcast Your Dissent” and the costs of maintaining alternative communities rise, due to the cost of renting servers, it may just make more sense to make a local intranet with your buddies who all have their own Jellyfin servers too, and that becomes a community resource so nobody in the complex needs a streaming service. I mean I have RomM, which allows me to play tons and tons of old video game ROMs in a web browser, so that could become a community resource, too.

There could be community forums and community weblogs, allowing people to update each other on new developments in the community, and updates to community servers, scheduled maintenance times etc. Sneakernets could share local community updates among different local LANs in the area, and share files via traditional file transfer from one disk to another so other communities can get new entertainment, etc.

Especially with Microsoft demanding everyone have a TPM 2.0 chip for Windows 11 there is currently a lot of shunted hardware that could easily be turned into local server stacks and then the only cost is replacement parts if things go down and the regular cost of electricity and maybe a handful of uninterruptible power supplies, and that’s only really if you’re on a system that power loss could cause problematic data corruption.

TL;DR: Seizing the means of communication may be just as important as seizing the means of production. In this case we don’t “seize it” we make our own parallel systems.

Oh I forgot to include this:

https://loriemerson.net/2024/08/31/a-brief-history-of-barbed-wire-fence-telephone-networks/

This is piece on the history of Barbed Wire Phone networks which were an early way to roll out local phone access in remote areas without rolling out much infrastructure. It essentially would be an “always on” community line. No ringer, you just pick up your local receiver, and see if anyone’s on any of the other receivers to talk. So if you had 3+ receivers connected to the barbed wire network, all of those would be able to be part of a big community phone call.

This was actually was initially got me thinking about these ideas and in particular how especially dissenting protest groups must stop trying to communicate using the tools of their oppressors. Secured messaging isn’t enough, we need to have messaging entirely removed from the wider, corporate and government controlled internet. Build parallel communications systems and begin to use those instead.

Oh, I also forgot to include LoRa texting for remote areas as well:

https://www.howtogeek.com/esp32-and-lora-module-let-you-text-off-grid-with-no-internet-or-cell-signal/

The point being that all these rely on building out our own networks instead of relying on all the privately owned fiber, cable, dsl, and ethernet that exists between us and our destination on the internet. We can’t avoid passing through someone else’s property on the wider internet, which makes it more at risk of interception and possible decryption. Removing it from the wider internet and closing the loop tighter resolves this.

Every “hop” to a new server online between you and your destination is a place where your data has been replicated to be able to pass through. Parallel networks avoids this entirely.

It doesn’t even need to be enterprise, honestly.

I run a rather significant local network with off the shelf consumer stuff and OpenWrt.

A lot of managed switches, a lot of ethernet cable, maybe some point-to-point WiFi connections for longer distances, and local DNS and DHCP servers that have failovers for redundancy. You technically don’t need a router because routers are for connecting different networks, and if it’s not connected to the internet, as long as you have local DHCP and DNS, you’re kind of golden for local services. You can even have internal TLS for local security. I do that with Caddy, it’s dead simple, and the certificates are locally generated for a 10 year period. I’m connected to the internet but I don’t expose any of these services to the internet, just my local network.

With a little more work, you could set up a VoIP server too so people could connect their phones that don’t have cellular service and use a VoIP app to be able to call anyone in the neighborhood by their VoIP number.

The notion that you shouldn’t run i2p, i2pd or other such software on a mobile-computer is… nonsensical when you take it out of the consumer-smartphone context.

it really is not. it sounds like you skippped reading my comment after 2 sentences. sure run i2p with transit on a normal, corded computer, with wired network if at all possible, that’s a good thing. but not on a “mobile computer” with a very constrained battery and mostly wireless only connection. unless you repurposed it as a server, and not using it as a smartphone anymore, then at least it doesn’t have to power the screen.

Mobile-computers trend on being more energy-efficient with larger battery capacities over time.

my phone’s battery has lower mAh capacity than my former one I bought roughly 10 years ago.

If we’re to take your concerns about data and energy scarcity seriously we need to address the CPU-cycles and data that are forcefully wasted against the users’ wishes

obviously, if a user was scrolling facebook all day instead of running an i2p router in transit mode, that would drain the battery quickly too. that is a choice to make, whether to scroll that much or not. compared to that, an i2p router would not need the screen to be on, but it would have constant CPU and wireless network activity, not letting any of these go to low power mode.

We should tell Google not to transmit any data from the mobile-computer that’s related to ad-networks.

which is not a constant activity, but a bursty one. for every x seconds of not transmitting anything, it’ll only transmit that data for less than a second. it does not keep the cpu and wireless adapters awake constantly. neither does facebook in the background.

Imagine wasting wireless networks by transmitting ads in high-resolutions and wasting CPU-cycles to decode it!

I agree in part, but you don’t have a sense of scales. how much resources consume this activity and that one.

The reality is this: mobile-computers are incredibly sophisticated and capable.

capable, sure. except the battery. i2p does not need much resources, but the hardware still needs a lot of power compared to what the battery can store.

When corporations abuse your mobile-resources it becomes the norm and is not even questioned.

but even they can only abuse it when the screen is on! when its off, their capabilities are more limited.

What I suggest is users take control over their property and use libre or libre-adjacent

I am running a fairphone with a custom rom. I don’t play games and the only social media app I have is for lemmy. my battery lasts for a day, but if I had a transiting i2p router in it, properly set to be allowed running all the time, it would not last 4 hours.

restricted behind technical knowledge

Knowledge is power.

Every older generation says that about every younger generations, this is nothing new.

I conversely find people opposing that because something about “normies” (a word I loathe, to be honest).

Same, I don’t disagree with you there. I’m not trying to gatekeep anything, and I think that even a slightly more polished UX will make a vast improvement.