this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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There's going to come a point at which the Feds/States will lean on the ISPs to handle the censorship for them. We've had people all over the Nat Sec system staring at the "Great Firewall of China" and asking themselves "Can we get something like this over here?"
All my IT and InfoSec friends have called me alarmist for suggesting even the possibility of a GFW of America, but every day that passes, it looks more and more likely to happen, doesn't it?
Start practicing circumvention techniques now, y'all, while it's still legal and cheap to do so. Learn amateur radio. Learn Meshtastic. Learn all the different censorship-resistant VPN technology out there. Host your own websites or services for friends, family, or your community. It doesn't make it impossible, but it does make it hard, and fascism is nothing if not lazy.
I like you
I've just been assuming that was the goal all along.
Fifteen years ago, I said on Reddit, "The U.S. is trying to become like China before China can become like the U.S." Of course, I got buried.
I've been saying some combination of China and Russia personally. It's easier to parallel now after China took over Hong Kong. Those poor kids fought so hard.
People need to understand the fascists were watching those instances too and they learned from them. The last 15 years have been like a road map for how to handle dissent and protests in a way that keeps you in power.
If this really about protecting kids, they could've done opt in blocking at the ISP level. Just a few new fields with ISPs and they have products that can take care of this already.
This is really about tracking every little thing you do online.
It's never really about the kids.
No just online.
Eventually it will be about restricting what we can access on the web.
It already is. Social media and algorithm manipulation have been an issue for at least a decade. All the stories about algorithm issues in foreign countries makes me wonder if they weren't beta testing.
We're pretty cooked.
This is why it's perfect time to get some tech literacy regarding tor, i2p, yggdrasil, and shadowsocks. It's not perfect solution to use tech to circumvent restrictions that shouldn't be there in the first place, but sometimes it really comes to that point and it's really nice to have all systems ready!
I'm making a website to aggregate all of this information. Pro net neutrality, anti censorship laymens guide. Still in the works but its called zoracle.life.
Confirm your URL? Domain is registered but not linking back to a website.
it's still in the works friend!! Making the whole thing from scratch with some cameron's world esque aesthetics and a unique landing page. I can definitely let you know when its live :) appreciate the interest.
Hi I have no idea what any of that means. Please let me join this class.
Arguably though, at some point they'll just say "if we can't read your traffic, you can't use the Internet."
Which still isn't a problem, as I'm sure we can come up with a means to encrypt traffic to make it look entirely legitimate. But it's going to take a while.
At that point people would probably go to a p2p adhoc wireless meshnet to bypass the ISPs entirely.
Meshtastic, baby!!
All they have to do is send a few crews with log dipoles or yagis. Take a few operators down and charge them with terrorism or something and a critical mass will stop using it.
We have the tech for drones sweeping everything everywhere with sensors. Cameras, radios, microphones, IR...
At some point you're just going to need to start shooting the fascists
Sneakernets, my friend. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pocket full of microsd cards traveling on the subway.
Flash drives of banned foreign films are the one method of accessing foreign media that north Koreans realistically have. It's extremely hard to prevent people plugging a flash drive into their computer in their home to view some media
Hey Google, buy me bulk 5 gb flash drives. I have a business idea.
Latency is horrific though.
That’s why I find systems designed for high latency by being “offline-first” interesting. Sync large quantities of information when you can, then consume offline. Like Usenet and email used to be. Most things don’t actually need to be “instant”.
You mean "at which point, people will just say 'oh, ok'". (Assuming they even notice)
"People" will just comply. Tech savvy people like us are the only ones that could circumvent it
Except if the topic is wifi meshnets, no amount of tech savvyness will get you around an absence of other nodes nearby. General apathy is actually a huge problem here.
So what do you propose? People who aren't able should set up nodes?
Also if wifi mesh is our last hope, oof
I say that as a freifunk participant
Yeah. What I propose is getting more people involved and caring about freedom preserving technologies before it gets to that point. A tiny minority of somewhat more tech literate people are not going to be magically immune to authoritarian checkmate scenarios through technical solutions alone.
I used to think about this via mesh networks as simply routers, but now with nostr, IPFS, atProto and that new BT messaging stuff Jack Dorsey is on. Technically you could utilize your phone as an access point to the mesh network as you move around the city and load all the comms in the background. The latency would be high, but it could work. Also with 5g tech nowadays long range mesh networks are much more feasible albeit probably expensive for a hobbyist.
Are there now legal means to do longer range communications? I thought the main limitation was you need to be licensed to do anything more than short range home wifi
I mean it's all licensed by the frequency and antenna transmit power, so long distance is possible with the right choice of protocol, antenna and frequency you can get a surprisingly long distance with unlicensed spectrum. Ubiquity makes some directional antenna for wirelessly connecting 2 sites that operate in the 2.4 and 5ghz ranges that can connect over distances of multiple kilometers
Except we'll have to keep using it because the rest of our families and friends are going to still be on there or pester us about why we aren't there with them to share photos of your sister-in-law's baby photos and videos and your aunt Tammy's vacation photos.
Yup
One... Not so disappointing fact is that means at least the Internet will go back to the pre-social media era.
You can feel it here on Lemmy still. It exists.
I don't know literally ANYTHING, so take that into account when answering this, but why can't a single person access the "Internet" on their own, without an ISP. Can't they be their own ISP? Or can't small groups of people - friends, family, co-conspirators - create their own private ISP?
The p2p meshnet that they were referring to basically is a local/small group ISP.
As for why a single person cannot (effectively) become their own ISP? It's complicated. Really complicated. ISPs have to pay other ISPs just like you and I do, unless they're a Tier-1 ISP/Network. Otherwise you're always going to be paying to connect to (and generally paying for bandwidth) another network that has access to a network that then has access to a T1 network. T1s are basically the largest networks that hold (or can directly access) the majority of people on the internet. Top of the food chain, so to speak.
So in theory, yeah, you can become your own ISP - but you'll still need to pay and be at the mercy of other ISPs. Datacenters are typically their own ISP, but they have to pay others to get online just like we do.
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.
Imagine the internet is a network of roads. The ISPs in some parts of town control the roads, in other parts they only control the stop lights. You can build your own road through private land to avoid the stop lights but it’s expensive. The isps can put traffic cops at the stop lights and monitor and stop you if they want. The only way to get around it is to build a road all the way to the destination.
I've tried a few times to check out i2p, it seems to take hours of leaving it running to even get to the point where you can very slowly and inconsistently load even the official pages though.
In my experience, if you have anything but "Network: OK" status (for example, "Network: Firewalled"), it's not working properly. If you're behind a VPN, you need to port-forward and properly configure a port in I2P config/settings. Another sign that it's misconfigured is 0 participating tunnels. This is how properly configured I2P network statistics looks like with high internet bandwidth:
spoiler
Thanks. Somehow the network actually seems to be working pretty well for me now, not sure why it wasn't before.
sometimes routers go offline before their routing commitments expire (12 minutes). maybe all your HTTP proxy tunnels got disconnected. Increasing the backup tunnel count could help