Franklin LópezJun 18, 2025

Yo, real talk—what the fuck are we gonna do when the internet gets shut off?

We've seen it in #Gaza, in #Iran, and when Elon “I-play-God” Musk blacked out Starlink in Ukraine. Every time shit gets heavy, the state or some oligarch clown just pulls the plug. It ain’t just a glitch—it’s strategic, it’s repression, and it’s a fucking reminder that most of our comms infrastructure is in the hands of fascists, corporations, or both.

I’ve been working with indigenous comrades who rely on #Starlink to stay connected in remote areas. And yeah, it’s wild that you can be deep in the bush and still shitpost from a mountaintop—but that signal still runs through a pipeline owned by a Nazi tech bro.

We need to be talking more about mesh networks, autonomous infrastructure, all that good shit that anarchist tech nerds have been yelling about for years. Decentralized, resilient, community-controlled comms aren’t just cool—they’re necessary for survival.

Let’s keep this convo alive and start building the lifelines before the next blackout. Shit’s coming fast.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/activists-are-designing-mesh-networks-to-deploy-during-civil-unrest/

Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest

The Mycelium Mesh Project is testing DIY networks that can be quickly deployed on trees or lamp posts during a political uprising.

VICE
Show threadCassandrichJun 18, 2025

@franklinlopez The degree to which modern commerce depends on the internet partly shields us from this. They can't actually take down *the internet* without giving us the equivalent of a general strike.

They can try to break access to particular communication platforms built on top of the internet. Diversity of channels, redundancy, and routing around censorship become key here.

Parallel infrastructure outside the current internet, and not controlled by the oligarchs, is also great and something we absolutely should be doing, but it's not deployed enough yet to meet needs on the short term we're looking at. Ultimately it needs to happen at scale where it replaces the need for a capitalist-infrastructure internet.

Show threadLisPi
@dalias @franklinlopez Delay-tolerant communications are also pretty important.

Low-latency communications tend to rely on much costlier infrastructure or alternatively only operate on a very local scale.

Most meshnets here that I know of do not exist outside of a few major cities (but even if they existed in all cities, inter-city routing remains a problem, there most frequently isn't a line-of-sight to usable radio repeaters). Routing to the outside world is further questionable as it tends to rely on easily cut-off internet access.

NNCP /would/ be usable to communicate with services on such meshnets though, as the use of snailmail or sneakernet (or phone modems) between the cities is a supported option.

> Imagine waking up and checking your phone after several evenings of mass demonstrations. You try scrolling through your Twitter feed, but it won’t load. You turn your router off and on to no avail. You try texting a friend to complain, but the message fails to send. Frustrated, you walk outside. People scattered along the sidewalk look as disoriented and confused as you feel

traceroute is love, traceroute is life
Jun 18, 2025 at 11:42pmWeb
Show threadTokyo Outsider (337ppm)Jun 19, 2025
@lispi314 @dalias @franklinlopez I'd really like to see the #Fediverse developed to have more offline capability. It shouldn't be difficult at all (for end users, at least).
Show threadLisPiJun 19, 2025
@tokyo_0 @franklinlopez @dalias The main issue with the current Fediverse as far as that goes is that ActivityPub has mistakenly included a lot of HTTP-specific elements in its protocol design, including low-latency query-response.

The ActivityPub specification would need updating to permit it.