* For a very comprehensive directory of Alternative Internet Projects see also here

Introductory Citations

1. Yochai Benkler [1]

"If we are to preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet, we must continuously diagnose control points as they emerge and devise mechanisms of recreating diversity of constraint and degrees of freedom in the network to work around these forms of reconcentrated power."

2. Geert Lovink [2]

"Instead of further going down the corporate lane of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook, I propose to go back to the original architecture of Internet as public infrastructure with decentralized nodes. It may be romantic to insist on the distributed nature of networks but it is a necessary political demand. Net criticism is a toothless project without a utopian dimension. Even if internet itself had a military origin in the Cold War, and is now dominated by equally destructive force of greedy venture capitalists, backed up by libertarian gurus. Let’s rethink the public sphere: another internet is possible!"

3.

There are four main forces arrayed against a future network of free and open data [3].

• Content providers want to insure that their every product is not only the only thing you are allowed access to, but that you only access it in ways that insure that you pay for the privilege.

• Data miners want your every move online to be traceable, your every desire at their fingertips, so they can sell you stuff.

• The networks want every bit you access metered, measured, and your every transaction subject to scrutiny and control.

• Various “elites” want to control what you think, what you say, and what you do, all to insure that you will never be a threat to their “power”

Introduction

Advanced readers, please read this crucial research essay on the Commons Approaches to the Infrastructural Gap:

• Infrastructural gap: Commons, state and anthropology. By Dimitris Dalakoglou, Jan 2017

[4]

What Can We Do?

1. Michel Bauwens:

As I see it, there are three main strategies being deployed. All have their strength and weaknesses, and I then conclude with the positioning of the P2P Foundation in that field.

1. First there are the hackers and their continuous attempt to create alternative infrastructures and to connect them to each other. Many attempts fail, but there are successes, like guifi.net .. however, not nearly on the scale necessary to break network effects of the corporate platforms. A main weakness of this strategy is the communicative isolation from where humanity is actually interacting.

2. Bringing the fight to the internet platforms themselves, because such communication is a basic human necessity and they should therefore be considered 'commons' or public utilities, not subjected to corporate whim. An example of this approach is the Facebook Users Union, but this trend still seems very small. My assessment: networked communities can mobilize massively, on occasion, both online and offline, but have problems in terms of organising for 'la duree'

3. Counter-surveillance, sabotage, and transparency, i.e. Wikileaks, Anonymous etc .. here also a very mixed record and also their very successes lead to a tightening of security on the other side.

My conclusion is that all three approaches are necessary, but not sufficient, and that what is needed is an integrative approach. This focuses on the more long-term work of re-creating a new social hegemony based on the interlocking of the multitude of self-organized productive efforts that are now undertaken under the umbrella of peer production and the creation and protection of old and new commons. This approach focuses on the further creation of commons and p2p initiatives with an integrative vision for transformative social change. It works on the pluralistic politization of p2p/commons efforts with the view of creating strong social and political movements for social change.

2. Daniel Pinchbeck:

"The changes that need to be made to our technical infrastructure, on a global scale, are clear. We need to unite the world’s population behind a project for rapid transition to regenerative practices. In this paper, we will explore how to apply this logic in three areas: energy, agriculture, and urban design. Within a few decades, planetary civilization could run on 100% clean energy, grow food through organic or ecological agriculture that restores carbon to the soil, and transition to eco-city design principles, enhancing local resilience, ethical values, and decentralized power.

Some general action items would include:

• Implement distributed models for agricultural, industrial, and energy production based on resilience; • Derive power from renewable energy sources; • Remove subsidies and factor in externalities, such as CO2 pollution; • Make consumer products that are durable, with replaceable components; • Transition to “cradle-to-cradle” manufacturing, powered by renewables, where all byproducts of manufacturing feed productively into the ecosystem. " (https://www.minds.com/blog/view/456257048271654912/toward-regenerative-society-plan-for-rapid-transition)

Basic Introductory Resources

The P2P Foundation supports the following appeal:

• People’s Principles To End Mass Surveillance

This is a specialization of our general Technology section, focusing more explicitly on the 'true internet' or distributed P2P infrastructures.

This documentation project was originally compiled in the context of the ContactCon conference to be held on October 20, 2010 in NYC.

Watch this video for context: Eben Moglen on the Four Forces Arrayed Against Internet Freedom and How We Can Fight Them: Must watch video with the first part highlighting the dangers to internet rights in 2011, and the second part how we can overcome them.

See also Andre Staltz on a Plan for the Global Airnet as an alternative to the Global Wirenet

What we're fighting against:

• telcos are currently overcharging by five orders of magnitude: OECD report

" the telco industry is currently overcharging for voice service by five orders of magnitude – that is, overcharging by a factor of 100,000 compared to market price for net connectivity."

• The profit margin for the telecom industry on mobile data roaming is in excess of one million per cent

"On healthy and functioning markets, the profit margins typically range between five and ten percent. This is an in-your-face example of free market failure."

• The telco industry charges more, kilobyte by kilobyte, for sending a text message from your phone to next door than what it costs to send the same message from Mars to Earth

• The Feudal Model of Computer Security. Bruce Schneier.

Introductory Resources:

Recommended core texts:

• On the overall perspective of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To Do, a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction of a peer to peer world And please help us improve our definition of what a true P2P Infrastructure should be: Defining True P2P Infrastructures
• Mondo.net's Ten Principles for an Autonomous Internet
• FC Forum: Characteristics of Free and Open Infrastructures Needed for Open Online Collaboration
• Aaron Peters: Establishing a Communication Commons: The other world that we believe is possible will require another media – one that MUST be commons-based. [5]
• Mark Pesce: Four Design Principles for True P2P Networks

See also:

• Gordon Cook on the Fragility of the Current Internet
• Programmatic Statement for the creation of a world-wide user-controlled network based on a distributed architecture, by Raffael Kéménczy
• Discussion via Google Group: Building a Distributed Decentralized Internet
• Report on Global Education and Research Networks, report on a global collaborative architecture, by Gordon Cook. [6]
• Towards an Infrastructure for Secure Leaking. By Finn Brunton.
• 11 Best Reads For Learning About Decentralized Applications

Some curated content from the discussions can be found here:

P2P Infrastructure - Discussions

P2P Infrastructure - Questions and Answers

Audio/Video:

• Podcast interview: Aram Sinnreich on MondoNet as a Truly Independent Internet : "This is not your average Darknet that sits on top of the existing internet. This is an Alternate Internet, P2P, Device to Device."

Books:

• The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World. By Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg. Situated Technologies Pamphlets 8: Spring 2011 [7]

Mailing list / Discussion groups:

Group email: [email protected]: discussing distributed, interoperable hardware & software, user owned data & identity, knowledge sharing & the acceleration of social innovation

Ecological Aspects

• The “Limits to Technology”: Ecological Boundaries of the Information Age. [8]

P2P Infrastructure Theory

• Spectre of the commons: Spectrum Regulation in the Communism of Capital. By Rachel O’Dwyer [9]

• This is not a Bit-Pipe: A Political Economy of the Substrate Network. By Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle. Fibreculture Journal, Vol. 138, [10]

A Credo

1. An Internet for the Common Good: Engagement, Empowerment, and Justice for All. A Community Informatics Declaration. By Michael Gurstein.

See also, the following credo:

• ... which could be ours as well, written by Markus Sabadello for the versionvega project [11]:
• ... that client-server architectures have become a dominant form of organization.
• ... that the above is true in the world of information technologies as well as in real-life societies.
• ... that the principle of these architectures - the flow of goods and information from the few to the many - has evolved not because it is the best solution to common problems, but because of a fundamental drive towards strict hierarchical control.
• ... that many existing web applications, while promising to deliver open communication, self-fulfillment and creative liberation, do in fact serve to exploit as well as manipulate people's data and behavioral patterns.
• ... that in recent years a strong development towards centralization of online services could be observed.
• ... that this centralization tends to harm rather than make good use of the full potential of today's information technologies.
• ... that insufficient privacy and freedom are only the most obvious of many problems inherent to today's client-server patterns.
• ... that in human history an overflowing concentration of control and power has never been beneficial for the people.
• ... that a peer-to-peer architecture can implement in better ways most applications that are currently designed in a client-server fashion.
• ... that a peer-to-peer architecture furthermore gives rise to an entire new class of applications and possibilities.

Citations

"Breakthroughs in our capacities to communicate and coordinate restructure society. Language birthed culture and hunter-gatherer tribes. Writing forged kingdoms and agriculture-age empires. Printing enabled nations and industrial-age economies. The Internet launched a new restructuring of society, but is constrained by computing tech designed for centralized control. Learning from nature's blueprints, Ceptr provides an evolvable, fully distributed framework for coordination and sense-making on all scales."

- Arthur Brock [12]

"The Internet is a wonderful leveller. But democracy requires a great deal more than mere ‘levelling’. Primarily, it requires political institutions that enable the economically weak to have a decisive say on policy against the interests of the rich and powerful."

- Yanis Varoufakis [13]

"Practically all of these machines have architectures that were designed to be controlled by a single person or a hierarchy of people who know and trust each other.... they can read, alter, delete, or block any data on that computer at will.… With current web services we are fully trusting, in other words we are fully vulnerable to, the computer, or more specifically the people who have access to that computer, both insiders and hackers, to faithfully execute our orders, secure our payments, and so on. If somebody on the other end wants to ignore or falsify what you’ve instructed the web server to do, no strong security is stopping them, only fallible and expensive human institutions, which often stop at national borders."

- Nick Szabo [14]

John Robb on the War over the Means of Reality Production

"Over the last seven years, with the advent of social networking, there’s been an online civil war over who controls our information flow and how they get to do it. It’s been a messy, confusing fight that has touched on the following:

• What type of information is allowed amplification, and what should be de-amplified?

• What is fact or fiction? Can truth be hate speech? Is fiction harmful (conspiracy theories or unapproved theories)? Should false information and ideas be censored?

• What is disinformation (harmful fiction or spun facts designed to mislead), and how can it be suppressed (de-amplification, soft bans, hard bans, blacklists)?

Until late last year, it looked like the conflict was over, and we were on a worrisome trajectory toward disaster:

• An open-source alliance of global corporations, online political networks (networked tribes held together by their opposition to some great evil), and struggling institutions (from academia to government) had won that fight.

This alliance had established a censorship and control system growing ever more constrictive by the day (that could, given time, rival the networked authoritarianism we have seen in China). It also used the system to control political outcomes in the US and beyond.

Worse, the system showed signs of non-linear behavior — we saw this when the networked monoculture created by this system rapidly escalated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine into a sprawling global war between the West and Russia (China, etc.).

Elon’s acquisition of Twitter and use of information warfare (the Twitter files) paused this trajectory. However, it won’t last long. One reason is that nothing was done to fundamentally change the nature of our information system (digital rights and ownership); another is that a new and much more disruptive wave of technological change is on the way."

- John Robb [15]

On the Need for a Solidarity Internet

"The solidarity economy is creative and energetic, spawning healthy attitudes toward work and more sustainable forms of financing. But this movement, perhaps because it prioritizes offline essentials like sustainable agriculture, local communities, and alternative energy, has yet to infiltrate the Internet as it should. Members of a food cooperative, for instance, may not notice the contradiction when they keep their files on Google Drive, process their payments with Square, and buy ads on Facebook. For now, these kinds of tools can seem unavoidable, though they need not be. The solidarity economy deserves a solidarity Internet."

- NATHAN SCHNEIDER AND TREBOR SCHOLZ [16]

On the Monopolization of the Internet

" As we enter 2015, 13 of the 33 most valuable corporations in the United States are internet firms, and nearly all of them enjoy monopolistic market power as economists have traditionally used the term. If you continue to scan down the list there are precious few internet firms to be found. There is not much of a middle class or even an upper-middle class of internet corporations to be found. This poses a fundamental problem for democracy, though it is one that mainstream commentators and scholars appear reluctant to acknowledge: If economic power is concentrated in a few powerful hands you have the political economy for feudalism, or authoritarianism, not democracy."

- Robert McChesney [17]

The corporations won't do it

"Given currently available technology, we should all have cars that drive us around in absolute safety, leaving us to lounge in the back and sip champagne.

We have all the hardware to do this — the video cameras, motion sensors and high powered computers — and we’ve had this technology for decades. So why don’t cars drive themselves? The answer is that we don’t have the software.

This software will not be “owned” by corporations like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, who are mostly impeding technological progress. (Google supports efforts such as Linux via Android, but their AI code in Google Now, language translation and driverless cars are not built in an open way.) This software we need will be built by a global community, taking on problems too big for any one team to even understand. We should have been working together all along, but it is necessary now for the few big problems that remain."

- Keith Curtis [18]

THE VALUES THAT MAKE THE SOCIAL WEB REVOLUTIONARY

Anil Dash:

• "A desire to improve and simplify the experience for writing and creating content online. This is probably the area that’s stagnated most until the recent crop of tools like Medium or Svbtle popped up, though there had been a few small improvements in more limited contexts where people carefully reduced the scale and scope of the messages being shared to 140 characters or a single photo or a simple, gestural “like”.

• An understandable, but still geeky, desire to advance the “open web” in a decentralized architecture that mimics the early days of the Internet. Based on the success of early open technologies like email, this technological desire is a useful way of ensuring that new systems don’t simply become completely owned by corporate interests. Frequently accompanied by a preference open source software, this area of endeavor has been characterized by a constant flow of quixotically unsuccessful efforts (Diaspora, Open Social, etc.) but is recently ascendant again with the excitement around App.net.

And the fundamental value which has given blogging and social media its moral grounding and its most significant impact:

• The urge to make tools for communication and community more inclusive, more participatory and more democratic. To my surprise, this goal has been the part of the social web that has succeeded best, empowering and enriching the lives of many people who aren’t privileged by geography, wealth, inheritance, social standing, or identity. While far from perfect, it’s inarguable that people of many less privileged groups have participated in the social web from the start, and have been able to impact the world around them, and that counts for a lot."

(http://dashes.com/anil/2012/08/you-cant-start-the-revolution-from-the-country-club.html)

"Freedom requires infrastructure

A man who has no tools to acquire his necessities of life is a slave to his necessities. Given those tools, he becomes a slave to the labour required to fruitfully use them. Only by transcending each difficulty as it comes, in a process not dissimilar to metasystem transitions, can the individual achieve freedom.

Similarly, if at any point the individual becomes removed from the infrastructure that allows him any of the previous metasystem transitions, then he becomes a slave to those who control that infrastructure." ( - Smari McCarthy (FCF Discussion, February 2011)

Tools for concentrated power vs. tools for diffuse power

"There are tools, technologies and discourses which favour diffuse power, and tools, technologies and discourses which favour concentrated power. Today the concentrated power mechanisms have the upper hand. All it would take to turn the tide is for the diffuse power mechanisms to gain the upper hand. I’d speculate that diffuse power mechanisms may have gained the upper hand in some fields in the 1960s-70s, and only the recomposition of capitalism as neoliberalism (with new technologies and discourses) saved it at this point (e.g. states were losing guerrilla wars to popular forces across the board in this period). If diffuse power retained the upper hand then any authoritarian regime created on the backs of diffuse power would itself be vulnerable to a reactivation of diffuse power."

- Andy Robinson [19]

The ambivalence of technology

"Imagine "change" not as a chain of steps (one after another, as the chain of production), but think of change as an an eco-system of spheres where there is not starting point but spheres that interact and depend one to the other. As production goes from a chain of production to the eco-systemic forms of online creation communities or peer production, the same happen to the change of the system. I think we have to be open to the idea of starting the change from the diverse spheres and see how they affect to each other, instead of trying to draft first a starting line. Furthermore, the tools have ambivalences, they open possibilities of freedom at a time that they open possibilities of control and exploitation. Dealing with that ambivalence is very difficult (there is not right fix solutions one for all situations; which it is a pity, because it would be easier just to believe fervently in a solution and stick to it centuries after centuries); but I think it would be a mistake to loose the opportunities of entering in to the eco-system of change though finding a way in the ambivalence. We need to learn to put the ambivalence in the side of the principles we defend, more than searching situations in which there is not."

- Mayo Fuster (FCF Discussion, February 2011)

Selected Projects

Collaborative tools with multiple functionalities (via the Open App Ecosystem group)

1. Disroot
2. Gibberfish
3. Stek.io
4. Sandstorm
5. Framasoft
6. Cloudron.io
7. Kolab

See also:

• https://indie.host/
• https://cap-collectif.com/
• https://ogptoolbox.org

Top Projects at this moment

Selected by Stripey

Alternatives to Facebook and other dominant private social media:

1. birdsite replacement: eg Mastodon / Pleroma
2. Medium replacement: eg Plume, write.as
3. YouTube replacement: eg PeerTube
4. InstaGram replacement: eg PixelFed, Anfora
5. Reddit replacement: Anancus, Primso
6. GrooveShark/ SoundCloud replacement: FunkWhale
7. MeetUp replacement: GetTogether
8. PasteBin replacement: DistBin

Selected by Richard Bartlett:

"decentralisation projects that are explicitly justice-oriented or commons-oriented."

1. Faircoin: cryptocurrency w/ cooperative, social justice, democratic, ecological ethics
2. osm-p2p: mapping tools supporting indigenous resistance to extractive industry
3. scuttlebutt.nz: gossip platform w/ great community
4. economic space agency: for commons-oriented decentralised programmed organisations
5. social.coop: democratically governed microblogging
6. redecentralize.org: community + app directory
7. Duniter: cryptocurrency with built-in Basic Income

Under construction:

• Ceptr-Holochain is "an evolvable, fully distributed framework for coordination and sense-making on all scales" [20], which enables the construction of Sovereign Accountable Commons and uses Holochains to go beyond the limitations of the Blockchain.

Selected by Tara Vancil

• "Mastodon has been around for a while, but since it operates on a federated network, it’s not quite the flavor of decentralized I think we deserve. In order to participate, you have to sign up to an instance, whose servers are run by somebody else. If you pick a good instance with a good administrator, you shouldn’t have any trouble, but you still have to depend on a single person to decide what you should or should not be allowed on your feed. Running an instance is also hard and expensive work. It would be great if we could find a way to make social media apps both free and easy to use.

• Patchwork is a peer-to-peer social media application with a rich community. It’s built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt, and acts as a standalone desktop application. It’s a little rough around the edges in terms of UI and performance, but the community is really great.

• I work on Beaker, a peer-to-peer browser, and we’ve built APIs that give developers the ability to publish on the user’s “profile” and “timeline”. Profiles in Beaker are just datasets that live on the user’s computer, and are transported over a peer-to-peer network. With Beaker’s APIs, applications can ask the user for permission to read/write to a user’s profile. The best part is that because user data is separate from application code, there’s no one social media app we all have to agree upon. As long as we all structure our data in the same format, we’re each free to use any compatible application. I work on Beaker because I think it’s the kind of Web we deserve."

(https://taravancil.com/blog/women-boycott-twitter/)

See also

• See the top 10 choice by Venessa Miemis: 10 Projects to Liberate the Web

• Here are other projects that are working against such attempts and that we find worthty of support:

1. We Rebuild is a cluster of net activists who have joined forces to collaborate on issues concerning access to a free internet without intrusive surveillance [21]
2. Open Source Mesh Networking projects monitored by Open Source Mesh
3. Various strategies to achieve Free Fiber to the home
4. High Priority Free Software Projects: "The FSF high-priority projects list serves to foster the development of projects that are important for increasing the adoption and use of free software and free software operating systems."
5. MondoNet: "Sinnreich envisions a new internet that uses mesh networking to produce a stable, ad hoc, global wireless network in which each user is a router, server and client combined, and in which no single state or organization can effectively censor or surveil the population on a broad scale. To date, Sinnreich and his team have developed a set of “social specifications” describing the functionalities required of MondoNet, and are in the process of mapping these specifications to open technological platforms."

• an alternative to Facebook, Noosfero: "a web platform for social and solidarity economy networks with blog, e-Porfolios, CMS, RSS, thematic discussion, events agenda and collective inteligence for solidarity economy". [22]

* The X-Lab project of Sascha Meinrath

• More comprehensitive list of projects to decentralize/distribute the internet:

1. Appleseed [23] - distributed social network
2. Bitcoin, a decentralized internet currency.
3. CJDNS [24] Project to create a globally-scalable distributed mesh network protocol, overlay on IP or direct links between nodes; based on Kademlia and supports IPv6 socket application-layer interfaces. Hyperboria uses this protocol.
4. Diaspora will hopefully be a social networking community where users can run their own federated “pods”, thus owning their personal data and directly controlling what is shared with who.
5. The Dot-P2P Project, an alternative DNS hierarchy that resists censorship.
6. The Freedom Box initiated by Eben Moglen and the Freedom Box Foundation: independent plug-in server
7. Freenet: "the first decentralized scalable P2P network, and the first to apply a P2P approach to Internet anonymity. Freenet is probably the highest-profile decentralized anonymous p2p network. Freenet is also the only anonymous P2P system that can operate as a "Darknet"."
8. GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking that does not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services
9. GNU Social [25]
10. IsoGrid [26] Project to create the world's first globally-scalable distributed mesh network protocol. Based on source-routed isochronous streams rather than asynchronous packets.
11. LittleShoot is a new web-based p2p file sharing site founded by one of the creators of LimeWire that could live up to its pedigree
12. Lorea [27] - distributed social networks, already running on 10 networks
13. Kune - a free/libre distributed web platform focused on: the collaborative edition in real time of free contents, thinking on the collaborative work of collectives and organizations; its publishing on the web; and the communication in social network among social initiatives. Integrates Apache Wave & XMPP.
14. One Social Web [28] - distributed social network using xmpp
15. One Swarm [29]- F2F (friend2friend) P2P sharing; a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared
16. Open BTS: working on a new kind of cellular network that can be installed and operated at about 1/10 the cost of current technologies, but that will still be compatible with most of the handsets that are already in the market.
17. Open Media Vault [30]
18. Open-Mesh [31], Open Mesh is different from other efforts to build local networks in that their direction is not the connection between different nodes separated by larger distance but the extension of existing internet coverage inside buildings, and between adjacent structures.
19. OpenMesh Project, different from above
20. Open Moko, A project to create a 'free' or open source Open Mobile Telephony platform.
21. Open PGP encryption is based on self-issued certificates which gain authority as a result of a web of trust expressed via user- maintained keyrings rather than a hierarchical certificate authority system that can be centrally compromised.
22. Open Storage Pod, [32] open hardware project, small cubes to store terabytes
23. Open WRT [33]- GNU/Linux based free firmware for gateways and routers.
24. Osiris, serverless portal system
25. Own Cloud, data storage project from the wider KDE community
26. PageKite [34]: a very pragmatic attempt to enable more p2p-like behavior on the WWW by making it really easy for people to run publicly visible HTTP (or HTTPS) servers from personal and/or mobile devices.
27. Pirate Box [35] is a self-contained mobile collaboration and file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open file sharing network.
28. Plexus [36]: "Plexus is a protocol for the social web, ‘plumbing’ that allows all social web components to communicate: from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need"
29. Retro Share [37] - secure communications with friends
30. Seeks Project [38] - "social websearch"
31. Sovereign Computing Group [39] - similar project to Freedom Box, with a very interesting Manifesto.
32. Sparkle Share, [40] open source 'dropbox' replacement
33. Status.Net is a microblogging system that allows users to run their own Twitter-like site and federate selected streams with other systems.
34. The Tahoe Least-Authority File System, a highly fault-tolerant, secure internet filesystem.
35. Tonido, same capability as the Freedom Box?
36. The Tor Project, an anonymizing overlay network.
37. Unhosted: "Unhosted is a project for strengthening free software against hosted software. With our protocol, a website is only source code. Dynamic data is encrypted and decentralised, to per-user storage nodes. This benefits free software, as well as scalability, robustness, and online privacy."
38. YaCy is a search engine where many nodes share information to build a distributed index.

Technologies by Layer

The OSI Model

"The OSI model is a product of the Open Systems Interconnection effort at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It is a way of sub-dividing a communications system into smaller parts called layers. A layer is a collection of similar functions that provide services to the layer above it and receives services from the layer below it. On each layer, an instance provides services to the instances at the layer above and requests service from the layer below."

OSI Model
	Data unit	Layer	Function
Host layers	Data	7. Application	Network process to application
		6. Presentation	Data representation, encryption and decryption, convert machine dependent data to machine independent data
		5. Session	Interhost communication
	Segments	4. Transport	End-to-end connections and reliability, flow control
Media layers	Packet	3. Network	Path determination and logical addressing
	Frame	2. Data Link	Physical addressing
	Bit	1. Physical	Media, signal and binary transmission

"Some orthogonal aspects, such as management and security, involve every layer." ^[1]

Application Layer

The question is: how will existing and future p2p software run and work on the distributed internet? Some of it may work with little or no change. Some may need to have an interface to work with multiple internet(s).

Authoring Platforms

• See separate page for Authoring Platforms, copied from Disintermedia.

Software for Browser-Based P2P Publishing

1. Drogulus [41]- “a programmable peer-to-peer data store built for simplicity, security, openness & fun.”
2. Grimwire [42] - “a RESTful Browser OS that does Peer-to-peer over WebRTC.”
3. Open Peer [43] - “an open P2P signalling protocol.”
4. PeerCDN [44] - “PeerCDN is a peer-to-peer distributed CDN that will make the web faster, more reliable, and help sites to reduce bandwidth costs.”
5. PeerServer [45] - “a server in a browser with WebRTC.”
6. Vole [46] - “a web-based social network that you use in your browser, without a central server… built on the power of Bittorrent.”

Software for Distributed Use of Software Resources

1. eBrainPool enables software and computing as a shared resource.

Software for Distributing Use of Hardware Resources

• Gearman http://gearman.org/ "Gearman provides a generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes that are better suited to do the work. It allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events. In other words, it is the nervous system for how distributed processing communicates."
• MogileFS http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/ "MogileFS is our open source distributed filesystem." Runs mostly on Linux at this time.
• Memcached http://memcached.org/ "Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering."

Software for distributed archiving of scientific and other data

• iRODS https://www.irods.org/index.php/IRODS:Data_Grids,_Digital_Libraries,_Persistent_Archives,_and_Real-time_Data_Systems "the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, is a data grid software system developed by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments research group (developers of the SRB, the Storage Resource Broker), and collaborators. The iRODS system is based on expertise gained through a decade of applying the SRB technology in support of Data Grids, Digital Libraries, Persistent Archives, and Real-time Data Systems. iRODS management policies (sets of assertions these communities make about their digital collections) are characterized in iRODS Rules and state information. At the iRODS core, a Rule Engine interprets the Rules to decide how the system is to respond to various requests and conditions. iRODS is open source under a BSD license."

DNS

• The Dot-P2P Project, an alternative DNS hierarchy that resists censorship.

1. PageKite [47]: a very pragmatic attempt to enable more p2p-like behavior on the WWW by making it really easy for people to run publicly visible HTTP (or HTTPS) servers from personal and/or mobile devices.

Presentation Layer

• The Pangaia Projects aims to create a 3-d presentation layer for the Internet.

Session Layer

Transport Layer

• Project CCNx, replacing named hosts with named content as the primary abstraction; the aim is to replace TCP/IP as protocol to make the internet less carrier-dependent [48]. See Content-Centric Networking

• Swift is a multiparty transport protocol. Its mission is to disseminate content among a swarm of peers. It might be understood as BitTorrent at the transport layer. [49]

• Phantom: System for generic, decentralized, unstoppable internet anonymity. The Phantom protocol is a system for decentralized anonymization of generic network traffic.

[50]

Network Layer

Data Link Layer

Physical Layer

Cross-Layer Functions

Distributed Technologies by Sector

Anonimity and Censorship Circumvention

1. Anon+, Anon Plus, first anonymous social network
2. FreeGate
3. Freenet: "the first decentralized scalable P2P network, and the first to apply a P2P approach to Internet anonymity. Freenet is probably the highest-profile decentralized anonymous p2p network. Freenet is also the only anonymous P2P system that can operate as a "Darknet"."
4. Phantom: System for generic, decentralized, unstoppable internet anonymity. The Phantom protocol is a system for decentralized anonymization of generic network traffic.

[51]

1. Tonika is an administration-free platform for large-scale open-membership (social) networks with robust security, anonymity, resilience and performance guarantees.
2. Telex: circumventing state-level censorship
3. Tor: Anonymizer Sites & Services: "there are two general types: networked and single-point. There is one known networked anonymizer called EFF Tor, highly recommended"
4. UltraSurf

P2P Currencies

1. Bitcoin, a decentralized internet currency.
2. Freecoin, a free code client to support Bitcoin and other P2P currencies.

P2P Wiki

1. Proposals and approaches to creating a p2p wiki, a new way of conceptualizing text (among of data types) documents.

1. [Timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals]

P2P Filesharing and Storage

1. LittleShoot is a new web-based p2p file sharing site founded by one of the creators of LimeWire that could live up to its pedigree
2. Open Storage Pod, [52] open hardware project, small cubes to store terabytes
3. Own Cloud, data storage project from the wider KDE community
4. The Tahoe Least-Authority File System, a highly fault-tolerant, secure internet filesystem.
5. Unhosted: "Unhosted is a project for strengthening free software against hosted software. With our protocol, a website is only source code. Dynamic data is encrypted and decentralised, to per-user storage nodes. This benefits free software, as well as scalability, robustness, and online privacy."
6. Where's the Party: scalable, censorship-resistant mirror network for the web

P2P Hardware

1. The Commotion Wireless Project: 'device-as-infrastrucure' distribution communications platform
2. The Freedom Box initiated by Eben Moglen and the Freedom Box Foundation: independent plug-in server
3. The Mesh Potato, an Open Source, Open Hardware Wifi mesh access point with built-in ATA, part of the Village Telco
4. Sovereign Computing Group [53] - similar project to Freedom Box, with a very interesting Manifesto.
5. Tonido is a peer-to-peer personal web platform that helps users to access, share, sync important files, favorite photos, music and media with friends and family without relying on third party public online services. As FreedomBox, TonidoPlug is based on debian derivative Ubuntu OS and powered by Tonido platform. It can do all the things that are promised by FreedomBox already - P2P Backup, P2P messaging, P2P Collaboration, File & Music sharing and much more
6. Open source appropriate technology (OSAT) refers to technologies that are designed in the same fashion as free and open-source software. These technologies must be "appropriate technology" (AT) - meaning technology that is designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economical aspects of the community it is intended for.
7. RepRap project - a free and open-source self-replicating rapid prototyper - a 3D printer - capable of making more than half of its own parts and P2P digital fabrication of many goods -- see:Open source 3-D printing of OSAT
8. Recyclebot is a waste plastic extruder that creates 3-D printer filament from waste plastic and natural polymers.
9. Building Research Equipment with Free, Open-Source Hardware,The open-source paradigm is now enabling creation of open-source scientific hardware by combining 3D printing with open-source microcontrollers running on FOSS. Examples include: Open-source 3D-printable optics equipment, Open-source colorimeter

P2P Identity and Relationality

1. Project Danube: "an open-source project offering software for identity and personal data services on the Internet. The core of this project is an XDI-based Personal Data Store - a semantic database for your personal data, which always remains under your control."

P2P Network Computing

1. For the most fully distributed Peer to Peer Computer Networks at present, please check out Tribler ;Peerple ; Wipeer
2. Research into more fully distributed P2P systems for the future: Chord, CX Project, Farsite, Globe Project, Oceanstore, Pastry
3. Decentralized P2P software programs are monitored and indexed here; Flud maintains a list of Distributed Internet-based Backup Systemssuch as Tahoe

P2P Power Grid

1. SolarNetOne [54] :providing public and private Internet access and related services to areas that do not have the benefit of a reliable power or communications grid.
2. Open-source development of solar photovoltaic technology - solar cells provide distributed generation and can be set up in a P2P network also known as a microgrid

P2P Publishing and Broadcasting

• "The P2P-Next integrated project will build a next generation Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content delivery platform, to be designed, developed, and applied jointly by a consortium consisting of high-profile academic and industrial players with proven track records in innovation and commercial success."

• Software for browser-based p2p publishing:

1. Drogulus [55]- “a programmable peer-to-peer data store built for simplicity, security, openness & fun.”
2. Grimwire [56] - “a RESTful Browser OS that does Peer-to-peer over WebRTC.”
3. Open Peer [57] - “an open P2P signalling protocol.”
4. PeerCDN [58] - “PeerCDN is a peer-to-peer distributed CDN that will make the web faster, more reliable, and help sites to reduce bandwidth costs.”
5. PeerServer [59] - “a server in a browser with WebRTC.”
6. Vole [60] - “a web-based social network that you use in your browser, without a central server… built on the power of Bittorrent.”

P2P Social Networks

• For a long directory of Distributed Social Network Projects‎, see here
• For Federated Projects, see here
• For an alternative, even longer list in table format on Wikipedia, see here
• GNU Social has listed many projects here so that it can compare its own objectives with theirs (see also GNU Social below).

---

1. Anon+, Anon Plus, first anonymous social network
2. Appleseed - distributed social network
3. Diaspora will hopefully be a social networking community where users can run their own federated “pods”, thus owning their personal data and directly controlling what is shared with who.
4. GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking that does not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services
5. GNU Social
6. Lorea] - distributed social networks, already running on 10 networks
7. Kune - a free/libre distributed web platform focused on: the collaborative edition in real time of free contents, thinking on the collaborative work of collectives and organizations; its publishing on the web; and the communication in social network among social initiatives. Integrates Apache Wave & XMPP.
8. One Social Web [61] - distributed social network using xmpp
9. One Swarm [62]- F2F (friend2friend) P2P sharing; a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared
10. Plexus [63]: "Plexus is a protocol for the social web, ‘plumbing’ that allows all social web components to communicate: from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need"
11. Tahrir Project: twitter alternative
12. W3C Federated Social Web Incubator Group [64] : "to provide a set of community-driven specifications and a test-case suite for a federated social web."

See also:

1. List of projects interested in incorporating technologies related to Federated Social Web
2. Comparison of Micro-Blogging Services tables comparing general and technical information for some notable microblogging services and social network services that have status updates.

P2P Searching

Introduction by Toni Prug: We need Open Process Search Systems.

1. List of Distributed Search Engines; [65]
2. Seeks Project [66] - "social websearch"
3. YaCy is a search engine where many nodes share information to build a distributed index.

P2P Virtual Worlds

1. Open Cobalt is an open-source platform for building and sharing virtual worlds, like an open-source Second Life. It is designed to run without a centralized server.
2. Peer to Peer Virtual Worlds: VastPark, Solipsis, Vast; see also: Multiverse

P2P Wireless Meshworks and Telephony

To read:

• The indispensable Global Survey of Free Networks. User Built Infrastructure Held as a Commons. By Gordon Cook. The Cook Report, Nov-Dec 2013.

• Peer to Peer User Owned Communications Infrastructure. Gordon Cook. Cook Report, March-April 2012. [67]: a very detailed treatment of the alternative, user-owned p2p infrastructures that are emerging, and detailing in particular the case study of Isaac Wilder’s FreedomTower meshwork.

See also:

1. Ad-hoc Dark (roast) Network Travel Mug - Travel mug designed for creating ad-hoc “dark” networks for communication along a morning commute using an Arduino and an XBee module.
2. Aidphone Flybox - box with inmarsat terminal, wifi access point, and GSM basestation to provide internet & mobile phone service to indy journalistsin crisis situations
3. The Commotion Wireless Project: 'device-as-infrastrucure' distribution communications platform
4. Ekiga: an open source SoftPhone, Video Conferencing and Instant Messenger application over the Internet.
5. GNU Free Call is a new project to develop and deploy secure self-organized communication services worldwide for private use and for public administration. We use the open standard SIP protocol and GNU SIP Witch to create secured Peer-to-Peer Mesh Calling Networks
6. Mesh Potato: a new device for providing low-cost telephony and Internet in areas where alternative access either doesn’t exist or is too expensive.
7. Open BSC: [68] OpenBSC is a GSM network in a box software, implementing the minimal necessary parts to build a small, self-contained GSM network.
8. Open BTS: OpenBTS is an open-source Unix application that uses the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to present a GSM air interface ("Um") to standard GSM handset and uses the Asterisk® software PBX to connect calls. The combination of the ubiquitous GSM air interface with VoIP backhaul could form the basis of a new type of cellular network that could be deployed and operated at substantially lower cost than existing technologies in greenfields in the developing world.
9. Open-Mesh [69], Open Mesh is different from other efforts to build local networks in that their direction is not the connection between different nodes separated by larger distance but the extension of existing internet coverage inside buildings, and between adjacent structures.
10. OpenMesh Project: global project born after the Egyptian blackout
11. Peep Wireless is proposing a peer-to-peer alternative to the hegemony of cell providers that could provide low-cost mobile connectivity to low-income populations.
12. Pirate Box [70] is a self-contained mobile collaboration and file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open file sharing network.
13. Project Byzantium: communicating without access to the internet
14. Project Kleinrock: an attempt to create an autonomous and decentralized "second layer" of the Internet, which can operate without the use of ISP's [71]
15. Ronja [72] - wireless networking device with range of 1.4km & communication speed of 10Mbps full duplex
16. ROBIN [73] - open source mesh firmware that can technically run on any device that support Open WRT. ROBIN networks can be managed centrally through the use of dashboards like Surreal (http://surrealwifi.com) and Robin-Dash. forums here: http://robin.forumup.it/
17. Serval [74] ; the only working mesh solution that uses off the shelf phones and off the shelf unlicensed spectrum and existing phone numbers, and can work with absolutely no infrastructure.
18. Village Telco [75]: The goal of the project is to render local telephony in developing countries to be so cheap as to be virtually free. Thanks to advances in Open Source telephony software and the dramatic decrease in the cost of wireless broadband technology, we think this is entirely possible.

Local projects:

1. FLO Farm, Pennsylvania [76]
2. Grinnell, Iowa - [77]; the Free Network Movement is building a mesh network for the community
3. WasabiNet, working to provide low-cost Mesh Wifi to the Benton Park West neighborhood in St. Louis, MO!

See also: P2P Telephony

Miscellaneous

Please help us create entries for the following:

1. http://protonet.info/

Visualizations

* How do all these initiatives fit together? A proposed synthetic overview mindmap by 'Glistening Deepwater':

• 

  Map of global mind tech

* Scaffolds of Intentional Tech: "A framework for thinking about interventions within an “intentional technology” movement. Initiatives can be mapped against barriers and strategies". by Alexa Clay

Graphic via https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*xusZ8uGyKt2ncODm71YruQ.png

Resources

• Libre Projects: a directory of 136 open source hosted web services

• see: The Overview of Crypto Infrastructures, by Alexander Lange, with map

Key Articles

• Aral Balkan: On the Necessity of Protecting our Extended Cyborg Self

• Tim Burden: Forking the Internet, the history of a meme that came out in 2011, and inspired the ContactCon conference and meetup for an alternative P2P infrastructure for the internet. See also: Fork Freedom

• Maria Mies: Myths About the Internet as Commons

• JOPP Issue on Alternative Internets

• Guidelines for Developers of Platform Cooperatives ; see the article: Alternative policies for alternative Internets. By Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. Journal of Peer Production, Issue 9: Alternative Internets, 2016

• The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society. By J.Z. Garrod. Triple C, Vol 14, No 1 (2016) [78]

• The Energy Usage of the Internet

General Infrastructure

• The Happiness Treshold and Economics as a Science of Infrastructure. By Christian Arnsperger.

See also:

1. 6 Anti-NSA Technological innovations that May Just Change the World
2. Peer-to-Peer Systems. By Rodrigo Rodrigues, Peter Druschel. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 53 No. 10, Pages 72-82 [79]: overview of one decade of deployment
3. The Rise of the Stupid Network. David Isenberg's classic essay for locating intelligence in the periphery, not the core.
4. End-to-End Arguments in System Design: The best way to design a network is to allow the sender and receiver to decide what the data means, without asking the intervening network to interpret the data.
5. World of Ends: Doc Searls and David Weinberger summarize the key characteristics of the internet.
6. towards Augmented Social Networks (ASN's) as platforms for `trusted exchange'.
7. On the Importance of Architectures in Social Studies of Peer-to-Peer Technology. Francesca Musiani. Journal of Peer Production, Issue 1, 2012. [80]
8. The Matrix of Convivial Technology – Assessing technologies for degrowth. By Andrea Vetter. Journal of Cleaner Production. Volume 197, Part 2, 1 October 2018, Pages 1778-1786 [81]

How-to:

1. Key tools for internet-enabled revolutions

Broadband and Connectivity

• [Bottom-up Broadband]]: the Open Source Spirit in Networking Initiatives. [82]: "This paper discusses open networks. The open software and open hardware movements are relatively well established and known. Contrastingly, there is little discussion on open network initiatives.

See also:

1. Telecommunication expert Gordon Cook asks: Is Bandwidth Infinite?
2. Various strategies to achieve Free Fiber to the home
3. How To Set Up An Open Mesh Network in Your Neighborhood (Archive.org)

Cloud Computing

1. Leaving the Proprietary Cloud, a roadmap
2. P2P and the Social Cloud. Rafael Pezzi: Part 1 and Part 2: programmatic statement on a truly open and non-proprietary internet infrastructure

Free Software Infrastructure

1. Understanding Free Software, Open Source Software and Floss, thanks to this booklet

P2P Network Computing

1. Peer-to-Peer Networks as a Distribution and Publishing Model: the best introduction to the advantages of P2P Computing!

Secure Communications

1. FLOSS Manual for Circumvention Tools‎ ; Bypassing Internet Censorship. [83]
2. Guide to Mobile Security for Citizen Journalists‎; [84]
3. EPIC Online Guide to Practical Privacy Tools‎ [85]
4. Anonymous Blogging with WordPress and Tor‎ [86]
5. Security in a Box‎
6. Quick Guide to Secure Communication‎ [87]
7. Everyone's Guide to Bypassing Internet Censorship‎

Wireless Meshworks

To read:

• Peer to Peer User Owned Communications Infrastructure. Gordon Cook. Cook Report, March-April 2012. [88]: a very detailed treatment of the alternative, user-owned p2p infrastructures that are emerging, and detailing in particular the case study of Isaac Wilder’s FreedomTower meshwork.

See also:

1. How To Set Up An Open Mesh Network in Your Neighborhood. By Paul Davis.
2. Wireless Networks as Techno-social Models. By Armin Medosch.
3. Wireless Networking for the Developing World- a free book about designing, implementing, and maintaining low-cost wireless networks.

Key Audio and Video

1. Podcast interview: Aram Sinnreich on MondoNet as a Truly Independent Internet :"Aram Sinnreich from the MondoNet Project joins us to remind us of the words of John Lennon: “Imagine no Centralized ISP’s and Government Controlled Internet, Imagine All the People living in P2P Communications Liberty”. Well those are not Arams words, but if you are not aware of projects such as this, you are in for a treat. This is not your average Darknet that sits on top of the existing internet. This is an Alternate Internet, P2P, Device to Device."

See also:

1. Nicholas Tollervey on the Drogulus Programmable Peer-to-Peer Data Store‎
2. Adam Ierymenko on the ZeroTier One Project‎
3. Tony Arcieri on the Cryptosphere Project‎
4. Paul Gardner-Stephen on the Serval Project‎
5. Jacob Cook on arkOS Secure Self-Hosting‎
6. Christopher Webber on Media Goblin‎

Key Books

* The Bleeding Edge. Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World. By Bob Hughes. New Internationalist Books, 2016 [89]

• Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems. Byh John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. Basic Books, 2012
• Internet Architecture and Innovation. Barbara van Schewick. MIT Press, 2010
• Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals, by John Day. Prentice-Hall, 2007
• The Organic Internet. May First / People Link. [90]

Key Conferences

• Backbone 409: Autonomous infrastructures for a free Internet. June 14–15 2014, Calafou, Barcelona: "A gathering of projects actively building infrastructures for a free Internet from an anti-capitalist point of view: autonomous servers, open networks, online services, platforms, open hardware, free software, etc. "

Key Organisations / Stakeholders

1. Appropedia Foundation (Appropedia)
2. Brave New Software
3. Creative Commons
4. Electronic Frontier Foundation
5. Free Network Movement
6. Freedom Box Foundation
7. Forward Foundation and Future Forward Institute
8. GNU Project [91]
9. New America Foundation
10. Open Source Ecology
11. OpenNet Initiative: The ONI mission is to investigate and challenge state filtration and surveillance practices
12. P2P Foundation
13. Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium
14. Program on Liberation Technology (Standford University) [92]
15. Sarapis Foundation
16. Technology Liberation Front [93]
17. Tor Project (Tor)
18. Unhosted
19. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

See also:

1. Cook Report on Internet Protocol [94]
2. Free Internet [95]
3. NetZero Free Dial-Up Internet Access [96]

Key Directories

• This is the most complete directory so far: Redecentralize's Alternative Internet Projects Directory

• More:

1. Complete list of P2P Filesharing programs with comparative notes. + A list of free and open source filesharing systems
2. High Priority Free Software Projects: "The FSF high-priority projects list serves to foster the development of projects
3. Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial software in the OSALT directory
4. Top 100 Open Source Linux Applications
5. Open Source Living: guide to the best freely available open source software on the web
6. List of Wireless Community Networks Worldwide
7. Open Source Mesh Networking projects monitored by Open Source Mesh

To be refactored into this page

• http://anonnews.org/?p=press&a=item&i=554 The idea is to write a how-to on building mesh networks. The n00bs must understand it. Mesh networks are usefull, as they cannot be censored nor shut down.

Later on that How-to can become part of Anonymous' uber-secret handbook regarding safety. Version 0.2.0, a downloadable .pdf, can be found there http://goo.gl/SuY0f .

References