Saw this posted over on HackerNews, and loved it. I’m big on self-hosting, and this is an incredibly exciting idea to me.
The Promised LAN is a closed, membership only network of friends that operate a 24/7 always-on LAN party, running since 2021. The vast majority of documentation is maintained on the LAN, but this website serves to give interested folks, prospective members or friends an idea of what the Promised LAN is, and how it works.
Their manifesto is also worth reading. My personal favorite part:
We do not wish to, nor will we, rebuild the internet. We do not wish to, nor will we, scale this. We will never be friends with enough people, as hard as we may try. Participation hinges on us all having fun. As a result, membership will never be open, and we will never have enough connected LANs to deal with the technical and social problems that start to happen with scale. This is a feature, not a bug.
This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN. Connect it with friends’ homes. Remember what is missing from your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate and get it running. Build slowly. Build your community. Do it with joy. Remember how we got here. Rebuild a community space that doesn’t need to be mediated by faceless corporations and ad revenue. Build something sustainable that brings you joy. Rebuild something you use daily.
Bring back what we’re missing.
My friends and I had something along those lines around the early 2000s built with Linux firewalls and freeswan IPSEC tunnels. I sure do miss the old vibe and chaos of the early internet.
Bit by bit the tunneled WAN thing sort of became irrelevant as we built more stuff as internet facing services, to the extent that the fun parts were more likely to be installed in a datacenter somewhere than sitting on the LAN at our houses.
There are a bunch of p2p VPN systems out there. First step would be finding the one that works best for you and your friends. Nowadays, I would stick with something that is Wireguard underneath, as the older projects were a lot slower.
Yep, the issue for me isn’t the technical aspect, it’s more convincing any friends to actually do this too. I’ve set up a bunch of different services over the years for my friends and family, and no one uses them for very long. My dad actually asked me to set up an rPi jellyfin server inside his home network rather than use the one I host remotely. :/