We need an alt-net. It can exist on the net but separate and ungovernable to almost all degrees.
There was a william gibson book that described this as a "Walled garden".
Best bet would be a sort of mesh network which would be limited to urban or suburban areas unless you could somehow transmit over ham radio. @Morbo
If you're not familiar with it, check out LoRa and LoRaWAN for long range, low bandwidth wireless communications. LoRa can be used in many configurations and is simple enough to implement with minimal resources. There are LoRa/LoRaWAN mesh network devices out there that can reach some very significant distances for wireless communications. But, for as good as it is, it does have limitations and alternative methods should always be explored.
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/what-is-lorawan/
BTW, did you know you can take a relatively high power audio amplifier and turn it into a transmitter/receiver that uses the soil as its transmission medium? Take the negative end of a single channel audio power amplifier of at least 100 Watts nominal output and tie it to the metal pipe work for water or sewage. Take the positive end of the output and tie it to an earth ground rod or plate buried as deep as you can get it to be. Signals outputted by this arrangement can be picked up a pretty good distance away by a similar setup using a sensitive preamplifier also tied to plumbing and an earth rod. It can be a good backup for communications with a mile or so by using just car audio equipment. It's worth looking into.
That second part is very interesting, I'm out in the mountains where radio and even GPS fail in some valleys, that could be largely bypassed using that method.
Yeah, there are a lot of projects out there to make something like this. I've been looking into it for over a decade and have ran a node from time to time to check things out but it is just not robust enough yet. TOR was an attempt to make it so you could get to the larger world even if you are in the "dark web" but its not really a great setup. I am thinking something that has no interest in being a part of the "larger web" even if it exists on its infrastructure with a large amount of mesh systems interconnecting it where needed as a backup in the event it somehow can be profiled and "banned" from the larger infrastructure or so people that don't give a fuck about paying for an ISP can connect to it anyway.
Meshtastic https://meshtastic.org/
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