Building a separate internet - RightForge

[Symalsa]

Has anyone ever heard of the project called RightForge? They claim to be building their own parallel internet to avoid censorship.

I’m always suspicious of endeavors that call themselves “free speech” or “anti-censorship” immediately from the jump.

I’m just curious how high up their infrastructure really goes.

Re-Platforming America’s Deplatformed | The American Conservative

The founders of RightForge hope to help usher in a second internet.

www.theamericanconservative.com

Re-Platforming America’s Deplatformed | The American Conservative

archived 30 Mar 2021 11:54:31 UTC

archive.is

 

[Kill a Troon for Pikamee]

Just buy a baofeng, a raspberry pi, some additional hardware and you can transfer data through radio. Build a small network with some friends and you will still be able to call them niggers online even after the jews turn off the internet

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

I doubt this will go anywhere.

 

[Coffee Shits]

Their website is a pretty barebones WordPress marketing site. (Archive)

It's looks like they're a web shop that owns its own ASN, hosting and DNS servers? It's interesting that they're deplatforming-resistant up front but it looks like it'll be on good old Internet classic.

 

[Shoggoth]

Urbit solves this without creating new infrastructure, just by using new protocols.
The idea is nice but as soon as they get off the ground they'll be cut off at the knees by banks

 

[Madre Muerte]

Parlor 2.0

 

[Bongocat]

Any, and I mean any project branding itself as “free speech” or “anti-censorship” is doomed to go down in flames. The superior route is focusing on neutral FOSS/decentralization. Even left leaning decentralization accomplishes the same goal by it's nature.

Organizations like Mozilla are starting to come out as pro-centralization because it enables censorship, but there's still a ton of disagreement within their ranks. Frankly I don't really see them winning that fight. I think most everyone on the fringes of either side is sick of centralization for different reasons.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Any service like this will get destroyed by criminals - that's the rub anytime you have ultra privacy you're going to get people exploiting it for child pornography, drug trafficking, etc just like silk road.

 

[Dick Justice]

Any service like this will get destroyed by criminals - that's the rub anytime you have ultra privacy you're going to get people exploiting it for child pornography, drug trafficking, etc just like silk road.

Unfortunately true. We can't innovate our way out of this problem, the only way forward is to convince the population that liberty and privacy are human rights and worth protecting. Tor and i2p and freenet and such are good, but the most productive thing you can do is convince one person to leave google and facebook and tencent.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

I'm convinced the solution isn't to become Google 2.0. We don't want to create a new monster.

The way forward should be smaller market share services like Brave, and perhaps their upcoming Brave Search, for those of us that care about privacy. Speaking for myself, I am not looking for a search engine to break the law. The problem with big tech is that they've resorted to extra-legal means to suppress freedom of speech and association.

 

[Shoggoth]

I'm convinced the solution isn't to become Google 2.0. We don't want to create a new monster.

The way forward should be smaller market share services like Brave, and perhaps their upcoming Brave Search, for those of us that care about privacy. Speaking for myself, I am not looking for a search engine to break the law. The problem with big tech is that they've resorted to extra-legal means to suppress freedom of speech and association.

Freedom of association is harder to solve than freedom of speech, because your federated node hosted on some data center can just be kicked off and you're done again. Your association is a function of the existence of this node and your identity in it, not an immutable trait of the network itself.
What you want is something which is completely location independent and identity ownership. This means either everyone runs their own federated node on their computer or Urbit.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

Urbit solves this without creating new infrastructure, just by using new protocols.
The idea is nice but as soon as they get off the ground they'll be cut off at the knees by banks

Urbit looks interesting actually. If you could run this off a raspberry pi or something it would perfect because of low cost investment & easy setup. Well from what I read that would be a perfect world however I have no raspberry pi to play around it & I'm too lazy to setup a vm with this atm. Still the idea is nice. I think this would be more likely to take off than i2p or something.

 

[Shoggoth]

Urbit looks interesting actually. If you could run this off a raspberry pi or something it would perfect because of low cost investment & easy setup. Well from what I read that would be a perfect world however I have no raspberry pi to play around it & I'm too lazy to setup a vm with this atm. Still the idea is nice. I think this would be more likely to take off than i2p or something.

You can run Urbit off a RPi. There's an entire group on Urbit dedicated to it.
You don't even have to set a VM, if you have wangblows you can run Urbit in WSL2. It's not a long term solution, but certainly enough to play around with it.
I think Urbit is very likely to succeed.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

You can run Urbit off a RPi. There's an entire group on Urbit dedicated to it.
You don't even have to set a VM, if you have wangblows you can run Urbit in WSL2. It's not a long term solution, but certainly enough to play around with it.
I think Urbit is very likely to succeed.

Maybe it's time I get a raspberry pi then. I already have a small scale network switch. I mean I'd like a bigger network switch with multiple vlans & stuff that cost money doe.

 

[Shoggoth]

Maybe it's time I get a raspberry pi then. I already have a small scale network switch. I mean I'd like a bigger network switch with multiple vlans & stuff that cost money doe.

I'm running my urbit on a vps, but a RPi is perfectly fine for it. Working on a OP for a thread, soon(tm)

 

[Kosher Dill]

Working on a OP for a thread, soon(tm)

Yeah, give us the pitch on this, because "Functional programming with Mencius Moldbug" sounds pretty far from my idea of a good time.

 

[Shoggoth]

I hope this is a good enough intro

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-urbit-thread.88485/

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

These never pan out.

 

[Shoggoth]

These never pan out.

Can you be more specific?
I agree that "alternative-anything" is doomed to fail. Building a separate, parallel better technology does have a chance of succeeding. Especially if it is focused on building technology and not politics.
Then by changing the technology you've changed the playing field.