hey here's an idea

how about offering a subscription in support of a neighbourhood mesh net? where you manage coverage and exit nodes for subscribers, including relationships with commercial ISPs for communication with The Internet.

to anyone in the area, it looks like public wifi. under the hood, it's a network of short-range transceivers. outgoing traffic is routed randomly through exit nodes, obfuscating traffic like a tor circuit.

(1/2)

i could host code and other assets on github, like the software images used on transceivers, deployment documentation, terms of any relationships to commercial ISPs, so that the artifacts of the effort could be adapted and done elsewhere by others, per the situation in their area.

i could try to fund it incrementally through a patreon or the like, and use something like kickstarter to fund particular objectives.

i mean, i might see about doing that in pdx.

(2/2)

@garbados This sounds a bit like Freifunk in Berlin? https://berlin.freifunk.net/

@oneiro freifunk is awesome 👍 i need to dig deeper into their operation

@oneiro unfortunately many things are in german and i do not read german 😬

@garbados google translate is pretty good at technical german! and there's some academic papers in english I think...part of freifunk, though, is their particular culture; I've heard it's as much/more a cultural organization as a technical one, and that can make it hard to understand from the outside.

@oneiro that's really cool :) i found some more english docs earlier, and some that i can help translate 👍 i don't have the equipment atm to test the meshkit but i hope i will soon