Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks

[dead]

I am on a small fiber ISP in one of these states.

I don't think it is community owned, but the distinction doesn't seem that important from a customer experience standpoint. The scale and locality of the business is what makes it great. They can care a lot about the network quality because there isn't so much of it that they need to outsource everything. All elements of their infrastructure are not only on battery backup but also standby natural gas generators. My power and water go out before my fiber does. I've never had an outage outside of scheduled maintenance windows.

What about mesh networks like Guifi in Spain, Freifunk in Germany, or Red Hook Mesh in Brooklyn?

Genuinely wondering, why are so many people on HN allergic to any mention of decentralized solutions? It was precisely the opposite in 2014.

Now, anything that smells of BFT consensus, open decentralized protocols, smart contracts, distributed computing, gets lumped with “Web3” and downvoted to oblivion. I was surprised Freenet got through the other day without being associated with it, despite having WASM smart contracts and all of it.

Shouldn’t “hackers” welcome building new, disruptive things, especially if they are open source and disrupt entrenched centralized solutions of the entseeking “establishment” cartels? I feel like an old grandpa on HN today, still embracing the “old” “Hacker Ethos” that was being promoted by YC when HN was in its early days.

Has hacker ethos really today shifted to unironically supporting closed, centralized solutions, and attacking most disruptive technology by deriding it, downvoting people who speak about it in any terms other than dismissive, and trying to make sure it doesn’t take off?

It feels a bit like the story of the political left and liberalism — once upon a time the goal of liberals was to make race a non-issue, for instance, but now that same attitude is considered racist by many on the left. Once hackers were anti-establishment in an “information wants to be free” way. To liberate “systems” from “the man” and bust them open. I remember it. It was still the case a mere 10-15 years ago. On today’s “Hacker” News, if you’d look across a large swath of reactions to projects which aim to do just that, you’d never know it…

When trying to convince a Russian engineer a few years ago that the west has plenty of corruption, his main counterpoint was "yes, but it's not the same; you guys have a kind of corruption that's at least able to function." He made a big deal about how severe it is even in very minor roles.

With recent events I imagine the difference is going to decrease a bit, but I don't think it'll be the same within 4yrs.