Yep, the answer to many of these problems is I2P.

TOR was invented by the US Navy, roughly 1/3 of major entry/exit nodes are estimated to be comprimised / run as honeypots by various LE / Intel agencies, and said LE and Intel agencies also know how to, and have deanonimyed various people and groups on TOR that they really wanted to go after.

TOR ain't it.

I2P is a lot closer to 'it'.

The other part of the answer is:

Well, now it turns out data hoarders were not just paranoid weirdos, they actually had foresight.

If you can host your own at least several terabyte mini/curated backup of the Internet Archive, and plug that into I2P, then congrats, you now are the backup plan for when, not if, they get massively purged of even more of their content than has already been taken out in the last ~2 years.

The old cyberpunk line holds true in another sense of meaning:

The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed.

Wi-Fi mesh might be possible with neighbors, but mitm is extremely likely.

While not secure it could still provide a free and censorship-less alternative to the internet

Lora is typically 50k max (theoretical 256k). So less than dial up speed.

It is in no way a replacement technology for wifi.

Seriously. The reason CSAM merchants and drug dealers use Tor is because it actually protects their privacy successfully. Whereas, if you're using a VPN or whatever cobbled-together solution, the feds just have a hearty laugh about it, send a subpoena by email or use some automated system that's even more streamlined, and then come and find you.

Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web. But they have to do an operation for it, and if there were any solution that was any better, that thing would be even more infested with illegal material than "the dark web" is. That's just how it works. And listening to the newspapers when they tell you that it's a sign you need to stay away from those actually-effective solutions because "terrorism!" or whatever is a pretty foolish idea.

That reputation has entirely been created by the media frenzy over busting the worst kinds of criminals.

Oh they're all using the same technology? Yeah of course they are, because that's the technology that works the best. It has so many fucking use cases.

Funny that the media frenzy is hitting a fever pitch just as we most desperately need powerful tools for opposing fascism. Almost like that's not really a coincidence.

Paper money is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers.

A lot of inert things are used in bad ways.

Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely.

Tech corporations own most popular and visited websites/services, they are not going to do it. That said you have countries with major websites blocked like russia or china, while it upset many people censored internet is also a strong tool to brainwash people so don't assume a blockage would lead to a positive outcome.

I just ordered a couple of meshtastic transceivers. Here's what it is:

LoRa is a patented radio technique that uses some kind of fancy spread spectrum technique to give very low power sub-GHz UHF radio somewhat impressive range. We're used to a single Wi-Fi access point being able to cover about the size of a large-ish house with wireless data. I can't pick up my house Wi-Fi in my workshop at the back of my suburban property. LoRa manages to reach out several miles on the same amount of power as a Wi-Fi signal. The tradeoff is bandwidth. A typical Wi-Fi connection can stream video, LoRa isn't really practical for much more than text messaging. It is my understanding that it's designed to do things like industrial telemetry.

On top of this is built Meshtastic, an open source mesh networking protocol. You buy a little circuit board that's got a microcontroller, a LoRa transceiver and a bluetooth transceiver. You flash the Meshtastic firmware to it, and now it is a "node." "Nodes" can be configured in several ways, but in general they'll sit there and scream into the void looking for other nodes. Messages sent are like "Tell John I say hello. Pass this on Three times." If your node hears that message, it will automatically transmit "Tell John I say hello. pass this on Two times." So in that way, nodes can automatically act as repeaters.

So they have astonishing range for their band and power, and the automatic relaying of messages means a message can propagate pretty far. Mind you, it has limitations similar to old school SMS; a message is pretty strictly limited to something like 288 characters, including emoji.

Many "nodes" don't have much of an onboard UI; some do but the main intended way for the user to access a node is over bluetooth from the Meshtastic app running on an Android or iOS device. Some units do have onboard UIs or can host a web interface accessed via wi-fi or ethernet.

Meshtastic essentially forms an ad-hoc off-grid SMS-like service. The bandwidth is simply too low to allow anything like web hosting, audio or video. At a ham convention, several hundred nodes saturated the available bandwidth just with procedural pings leaving no room for actual traffic.

Encryption is permitted on this network, I wouldn't exactly plan a coup over Meshtastic but I think I could coordinate meeting friends at a restaurant without being stalked.

If your project is to abandon the internet, this may be one of many tools necessary.

The main thing to do is remain calm, make it a key voter issue, and watch the bastards fold right before the next election.

What's your plan to make it a key voter issue? Lamenting about it on censored internet?

We need bulletproof alternatives and solutions.

(IRC goes brr)

XMPP has been brring for a while now.

Enough folks drank the coolaid,

You say that like the UK all sat down in a room and most of the country said "please censor me".

Guess they need to work on their authoritarian hellhole of a country.

~American

I tried really hard to use IPFS. I set up a syncthing and did some auto-publishing scripts.

It's slow AF, and unless you pay some big player to pin your files there's only about a 1 in 10 chance of it actually being available everywhere. I had to actually peer my computers together to get sure fire access to my own data.

Then there's very little in the way of privacy. I did some JavaScript crypto self-decrypting archives that was kind of fun But with the distribution problems it just became more of a hassle to use than anything.