What I suggest/have done:

1. Rent a cheap VPS in a non-five eyes country that comes with a static ipv4.

2. SSH on random port with certificate auth only. No root, no password auth.

3. setup WireGuard server with random port.

4. firewall block all incoming except ssh and WireGuard port at first.

5. set home server to connect via wireguard as sole client to VPS.

6. individually add any ports you want to go to the home server from the internet as NAT forwarded ports. Basically WWW -> VPS -> Home.

7. have a separate WireGuard VPN for outgoing from the home server.

8. profit?

But it’s crazy complicated. At least it was for me. Not for the faint hearted imo.

Thanks for this! I’ll read up on it.

The name unfortunately put me off from looking into it before. Basically anything with ‘coin’ in it just makes my brain go to crypto scam automatically these days I think.

You are 100% correct. The issue isn’t the infrastructure per se, but the usage of it.

By decentralizing, I guess I mean finding a way to remove the ability for a mega company like Google from being able to dominate the playfield.

The percentage of internet users that can or will bother to run their own DNS is way too low.

How easily DNS can be manipulated by any network for the average end user is the blessing and the curse it seems.

Can someone considerably smarter than me, with time to spare, please just find a way to federate/decentralize DNS.

I can fathom that it is complicated, maybe even impossible in the current setup, but the internet we all grew to love dies a little bit more each time the mouth breathers try to restrict it on behalf of capitalism.

Maybe remembering ip addresses can fill the void of not having to remember phone numbers anymore?

Not sure if anyone else mentioned this, but you can just redirect traffic on your local LAN with an ad blocker like pihole ( I currently use adguardhome podman instance )

Basically, it rewrites any calls to your outside domain from within your local network, back to your local web server. As long as the site is setup with the certificate there, you’re good.

Then setup a nginx reverse proxy and you’re golden. Regular site outside LAN, internal site inside LAN.

Edit: spelling

I hear you and agree, but part of me wonders if that is solely because they were always nasty people, or they are actually reacting to the awful way they get treated.

They are already probably dealing with failing health, burying most of their friends, not understanding most of what is going on in the world, feeling left behind, etc.

In their shoes I’m not sure if I could be very cheerful myself. Maybe I’ll get the opportunity to find out and hopefully I’ll not be one of the ones you mention, but who knows.

Most of us are tired from all the crap of the world already, imagine 30-40 more years of that on top of the things I just mentioned.

Absolutely, which is why cooperative corporate structure appealed to me. Everyone has there same stake in it and still maintains their own separate lives. Only things that are agreed upon as shareable would be shared.

Like bulk food, equipment, etc.

TL;DR: capitalism.

I’ve put some thought into this and I don’t have a good answer other than because of how society is designed to keep us from doing it now.

Evolutionarily speaking, we are designed to thrive in smaller communities. It’s only in the more recent part of humanity that we seem to have moved away from that. I mean, there were still cities a long time ago, but within them were what could be thought of as smaller communities.

I myself am of European descent, but currently live in a place where there is a thriving native community and realizing that I sometimes have envy of some of their ways of life is what got me thinking.

For instance, in western society becoming elderly is almost seen as a problem, like a burden that needs to be “dealt” with. For them it is a station of respect and reverence. If an Elder walks down the street, they are taught to show respect and pay heed to their wisdom and guidance. If the rest of us are lucky, we can get a seniors discount at select stores by declaring they we are among the needy.

I’ve even went as far as researching communal living, intentional communities and cooperative housing, but I keep chickening out when it comes time to pull anything into action.

The idea of finding 4-6 like-minded families to share resources with and use our individual talents and skills to help each other really appeals to me. It makes sense to build resilience against harder times.

But to answer your question, smaller communities helping each other is against the capitalist ideal and is/will be thwarted at any scale by corporations and corporate influenced governments alike at every turn. So I guess that’s the most likely reason.

Probably totally unrelated, but I find it interesting that Canada suddenly lifts the electricity surcharge right when the US suddenly decides to support Ukraine again.

Like I said, most likely totally unrelated, but the timing is a bit suspect. That surcharge of 25% would have netted Ontario something like 400K a day from the US. Not economy ending, however I can imagine a lot of residents and business owners in the affected states would be mega unhappy about it.

I feel like this should be a quarterly post. Really liking all these setups.