rollin

You can have nodes on a mesh network which act as gateways to the internet, but such nodes are going to have to go through an ISP. There’s no other way to connect to the internet at large unfortunately.

this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.

You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.

A good tip is to search the Amazon reviews before you get a laptop for “Linux”. Even if you don’t buy it there, you’ll often find one or two Linux users saying how well everything worked, or didn’t.

off-topic but wow, it’s great to see so many lemmy instances up and running 🥰

it really looks like we’re well on the way to hitting critical mass