alt Hacker NewsI mean it would be amazing if one day access to the internet could be truly free (from costs for users, and censorship).
But as the world is now, it's not feasible in any sense yet.
The current internet is the best we have and it >can< work, we have to find solutions inside the current possibilities until tech is advanced, cheap and accessible enough for everyone interested to easily host their own infra.
But this is not easy, because what is the real goal... really?
It feels like most of the internet is about making money or involving money, even from the end users. Is there even something to fix when most people don't care enough to ditch knowingly harmful products like Facebook, TikTok, etc?
People in small towns and some cities in the Americas (North and South) have somewhat casually set up CJDNS an Reticulum networks. CJDNS had a lot of buzz in the 2010s.
In some places these mesh networks have nodes that offer paid gateways to the conventional internet.
Writing user-facing social/messaging applications that can work seamlessly between emergent mesh networks and the conventional internet, using cryptography based zero-knowledge tricks to preserve privacy, is necessary for these mesh networks to gain traction outside of just tech enthusiasts.
Some rural areas centered around some small towns have already done this but have kept it to themselves (understandably so).