this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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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.
Yes it has its perks
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.
But can they only access each other in their own "web?" Can they access the World-Wide Web on their private web? Or does that just expose them to all the other stuff anyway?
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.
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.
To some degree you could, but you'd either rely on Tier1 transits to access the entire internet (costly), or you'd use IXPs (keeping your traffic local to other IX participants).
This doesn't account for how'd you'd actually go into purchasing a port for your residential home, which would probably entail laying your own fiber to a data center nearby.
Like Metastatic on LoRA?
Or maybe we'll use software defined radios (SDR) to transmit on other unregulated bands (as a hacker, you can often force the software to believe it's in the wrong region to transmit on bands the FTC didn't approve, as long as it's legal somewhere.)
If you mean an HTTPS ban, it’s technically possible, but even mainland China and Russia haven’t gone that far. One major reason is that it would completely undermine basic internet security. It would instantly make man-in-the-middle attacks trivial, letting anyone sniff purchases, transactions, and more. Buying anything online - or using a credit card at all - would suddenly become extremely risky.
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
The situation does seem quite desperate. I'd like to heed your call. Please advise on most critical systems I should have ready right now today please. I know have a lot of work to do and must stay efficient
If the internet were fully controlled, you’d need mesh networks - DIY, decentralized networks using radios, local connections, or other alternative infrastructures. I don’t know all the details, but Yggdrasil is a promising modern project that functions as an alternative “internet” for mesh networks, while also working over the regular internet.
Within the normal internet, the most resilient solution against heavy censorship is probably Shadowsocks. It’s widely used in mainland China because it can bypass full-scale DPI (deep packet inspection) by making traffic look like normal HTTPS. There are ways for authorities to detect it, and there are counter-methods, but it remains one of the most reliable tools for evading state-level traffic filtering.
Next in line are Tor and I2P. Both are very resilient, and blocking them completely is difficult. It’s a continuous cat-and-mouse game: governments block some bridges or entry nodes, but new ones appear, allowing users to reconnect.
Finally, regular VPNs are useful but generally less resilient. They’re the first target for legal restrictions and DPI filtering because their traffic patterns are easier to detect.
Overall, for deep censorship resistance, it’s a hierarchy: mesh networks > Shadowsocks > Tor/I2P > standard VPNs. You can ask chatbots about any of these and usually get accurate, practical advice because the technical principles are public knowledge.
I have absolutely no idea what any of that is after tor. I have heard of i2p but I forget
Could you be responsible for what someone else does while your using the network then?
Only if you're deliberately running an exit node (doing so requires special setup).
Sorry, I meant in i2p
Pretty much impossible within I2P