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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 28th, 2023

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  • And you still can’t can self certify.

    Skill issue, you’ve always been able to self certify. You just have to know where to drop the self signed cert or the parent/root cert you use to sign stuff.

    If you’re running windows, it’s trivial to make a self signed cert trusted. There’s an entire certificate store you can access that makes it easy enough you can double click it and install it and be on your way. Haven’t had a reason to figure it out on Linux, but I expect it won’t be super difficult.




  • So, if you would, help me out with the ‘why’ part

    It eliminates a single point of failure, can be used to bypass censorship, and allow for community support/engagement in a way that is harder to track and suppress (in that there’s no ‘central’ hub and you have to go after nodes individually. From an opsec point of view, you’re still broadcasting a signal that someone in range can pick up). Obviously it requires many devices to make a good mesh work, but short of DOSing every channel or just blowing out the signal space, it’s gonna be hard to take that down.

    I see it as something like tor or i2p, not something for general use at the moment, but definitely has good uses.


  • 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.




  • There is a user here that mentioned he is in funding talks for a local, independent ISP. I’m not really sure I’m ready to be connected to my neighbors intimately. Good fences make good neighbors.

    Why do you think an independent ISP would operate any differently at the networking level on a per-customer basis? This is basic network segmentation, and my home gear can do that pretty easily. Throw each customer on their own vlan that’s a /30 and they can’t do anything more than talk from their node to the central router.

    Good firewalls make good digital neighbors, and an independent ISP isn’t going to survive long if Alice can access Bob’s home network over the ISP without having something specifically configured in Bob’s network to allow that.






  • Some hobbies have minimal levels of skill/knowledge/equipment to properly do them, and I’d argue that self hosting is one of them. You can say people are hostile to beginners, but I might say people are trying to save them from themselves by not just telling them how to slap shit together so they can put it on the Internet and get owned by Internet Background Radiation in a short period of time.

    My personal opinion is that beginners are too over confident in their skills or expect setting things up is like setting up an online account, and expect everything to be ready for them to install in their preferred method, and get upset when people tell them they need to upskill to be able to accomplish their goal.

    An example of this is a conversation I had with someone online about some docker distributed app, and people were trying to get the person to use docker like the install doc says instead of trying to figure out how to just install it directly into the OS, because that’s the way they’re used to doing stuff and they were determined they weren’t going to change now despite the software author’s supported path not including direct install. If the person was willing to learn docker (which is not very difficult if you can follow a tutorial and use compose files), they’d be able to quickly accomplish what they want while also opening more doors for them in the future.