Self hosting helps make the internet more decentralized, but at the end of the day someone else owns that series of tubes.
This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cool if we self hosted not just servers but networking infrastructure as well.
I have an extra class amateur radio license and one of the many niches within the ham radio hobby I'm interested in is packet radio and wireless mesh networking.
Packet radio could technically refer to any RF communication that uses packets, including wifi, but I mostly see it used to refer to the AX.25 protocol, which works like an old-school dial-up modem in that it converts data into audio tones that are transmitted using FM or single sideband radios built for voice communication. AX.25 is used mostly nowadays in Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) which is used to report location and status info. There's a website, aprs.fi, where you can track vehicles sending their location or weather stations reporting conditions and so on.
In the olden days there were tons of bulletin boards hosted over AX.25 all over the globe that you could reach either directly or through repeaters. There are a few hangers on, and I even hosted one for a while but nobody visited. You could by hardware terminal node controllers (TNCs) that had a BBS feature, and nowadays there are a few software TNCs available.
Several Wifi frequency bands overlap with ham bands, and various projects have arisen that modify commercial wifi gear to turn them into mesh nodes forming a wireless wide area network, operating under FCC part 97 rules rather than the unlicensed part 15 rules that they use out of the box. This allows higher power and channels otherwise off limits to wifi stations. The project I'm most familiar with is Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) which uses a fork of openWRT firmware. I've tried a couple times to get the other hams in my area interested in setting up a network, but it's slow going.
There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I'm not as familiar with.
This barely scratches the surface of what's out there. The ham bands are explicitly non commercial and there are limits on what you can transmit and how much bandwidth you can use, but I dream of a day when everyone's wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we'd be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.
It would already help if apartment buildings had an internal network with a single connection point, but I can tell you as someone who worked on this as a volunteer for student dormitories back in the day that ISPs are extremely hostile to the idea.
No thanks, double-NATing is not my idea of fun when it comes to self-hosting.
That is a silly assumption, like why would you assume the worst possible setup? And it would be much easier to talk to the person managing the apartment internet than having to deal with some AI chatbot that pretends to be the support at some shitty ISP.
(/¯ ಠ_ಠ)/¯
Many apartments are owned by the inhabitants or are cooperatively managed.
Not in the US they aren't.
Well... you found your problem then. It is neither my problem, nor a problem of apartments in general 🤷
It is a huge problem here, unfortunately.
This. Though theoretically you could do it without CGNAT, maybe some type of complex vlan arrangement? I'm not sure, I'm not a networkologist.
I do know that I just got fiber down my road from a smaller company, still a big multi state company, but not Comcast or charter big. I called them because I was worried about CGNAT for my self hosting. The salesman didn't know what I was talking about, which is disappointing but not surprising. But they forwarded me to the tech guys, who also claimed to not know what I was talking about... Which was either a downright lie, or they were idiots, either way it's very concerning.
The price was right though, $5 cheaper per month, for 10 times faster download, and 30 times faster upload. So I gave it a shot. Thankfully I'm not behind a CGNAT, yet 🤞
afaik the Ruhr Universiry of Bochum has an intranet that connects the uni and all the dorms. And they selfhost a couple of services, like email, git and pastebin. You can see a line going to the dorms on the graph.
https://noc.rub.de/web/services/start
https://nedi.noc.rub.de/netweather/
Yeah, German Universities have special direct internet access via the "Hochschulnetz". We had some pretty fancy 5ghz directional wifi connections over several km connecting to it, but it was fairly slow (shared 10 mbit), which made that impractical for most private internet use.
Universities all over the world own their fair share of regional and national network. They also host a lot of services however in most of study field the student are not educated about it and go for corporate solutions. Professor may know about it but they are not sensibilised enough to understand they should teach to choose these tools
I just learned about Internet2 at SuperCompute in my decades of being in the networking space
Some do, but that means you're locked in to whoever the landlord chooses for the ISP, and you can't call the ISP for support if you have issues.