this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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It would be really nice to have a community where everyone had household compute that was their "main" computer. They could be the hubs for communications that's always on, and you could set it up to communicate with an otherwise anonymous public handheld, or just leave it until you get home and decide to get online. handhelds wouldn't need to be repositories of sensitive data, they could just be thin clients that could be safely wiped and restored (without needing a corporate entity's help or permission) in the event of damage or theft. Home networks could become overlapping network nodes, reducing or eliminating the need for regional or global internet provider services. We could really run the internet ourselves.
I don't know about running the whole internet over peer-to-peer network, but my home server is pretty much the 'main' computer and while phones an laptops obviously have data locally it's also synced to the server so losing one mobile device isn't really a big deal (besides money to get a new one). Immich for photos, nextcloud for other data, radicale for contacts and calendar and self hosted imap-server for emails.
Obviously the devices are still very much personal, but it's easy enough to wipe and start over if needed. For remote wipe I still need to rely with google on phone and with laptop there's currently no way to remote wipe it but it's running with encrypted drive anyway so it's only the monetary value of the thing in case it's lost.
That sounds really nice. The peer network is definitely more of a long-term thing, but it would be really nice to have a strong municipal peer network in addition to long-range providers. I'm not saying ISPs need to go away entirely, but I would like the world to be in a place where they could disappear and the internet could still function.
There are various mesh-network projects around and it's better than nothing, but their issues tend to be pretty low bandwidth and physically limited area. Wifi-mesh in a somewhat densely populated area is technically possible, but technology says that you need to be pretty close (100m give or take) to the next node. On rural areas people have built pretty long range wireless jumps without ISPs but hardware requirements for those are a bit different and you're relying heavily on the node next to you in upstream direction.
Then there's things like LoRa Networking, but their bandwidth is very small and it's really only suitable for SMS-style messaging with pretty low traffic, but it can reach up to 10km between nodes. AX.25 over amateur radio has range up to hundreds of kilometers, but it's also pretty slow (~1kbps).
So, in practise, the best would be to use something like NNTP and distributed servers across the mesh network where you're less dependent on long range high speed communications. Modern web experience or instant messaging just isn't really feasible over any mesh network with current consumer-grade hardware.
I've sort of started to do something like this. I quit using streaming services, I re-downloaded a billion .mp3 files. I downloaded and converted all my Audible books and cancelled the service. I download podcasts instead of streaming them.
If I'm going on a trip, I'll transfer a couple of audio books, some podcasts and a bunch of music to my phone. I keep about 5000 songs in the phone constantly, changing them every now and then as the feeling takes me. I use my phone like a old timey mp3 player and instead of carrying the local public trans schedule booklet, like I did 20 years ago, I now have the schedule website saved on my phone.
I still have internet access and connection on the phone but I try to avoid it as much as possible. But I don't do silly extremes where I'm not "allowed" to use it at all. If I'm bored waiting for a doctor or something and I want to watch a youtube video, I watch a youtube video. But the strange thing is, once you think of the phone as a mp3 player, you sort of dont have the desire to use it as a instant entertainment machine. Some sort of switch snapped in my head when I did all that.
Anyway, sorry if this became incoherent, I'm trying to type this out before getting my afternoon coffee and I want the coffee more than I want to make sense.
Not incoherent at all, that sounds really nice. One of my ambitions is to have my "main" cell phone just be a postmarketOS device that can receive calls and texts and select encrypted data from home base. Eventually I'd like to be able to just flash an image onto a cell phone and have it hooked into my VPN and basically just have it communicate solely with my home server, but that dream is still a ways away.
If the people who are infinitely more smart than me, would work for free a little bit harder and do a proper mobile Linux OS, what you are describing might be very easy to do.
Easy is the goal, but it turns out mobile OSes are hard to make, harder when the entire for-profit ecosystem is actively trying to undercut free solutions. Right now I'm working with old devices that, while they are running postmarketOS, are still pretty janky and have a lot of missing functionality. Still, a lot progress is being made, by an army of regular folks who pitch in when and where they can, and somehow the boulder of free software slowly but inexorably rolls uphill. It's very cool to watch.
Yup. I'm actually planning on getting a second phone that will be my daily driver, one that I can just try out different things, like whatever Linux OS's there are available etc. Then have another phone that I will do the banking stuff and whatnot.