this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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Is there any progress on a peer to peer alternative to the internet? I’m not talking TOR, I’m talking full mesh, as in the hardware backbone is peer to peer as well
Yes! It's a fairly new, but nonetheless impressive system called Reticulum. If you're familiar with mesh networks, it is essentially an entire networking stack you can flash to many devices, even an ESP-32. It has the ability to use existing infrastructure as well, so it can bridge the gap between mesh nodes and the greater internet on its own.
Personally, I have one ESP32 node for Meshtastic, and another for Reticulum. They run on the exact same hardware, like a prebuilt Meshtastic node you can buy online is one firmware flash away from (hypothetically) cutting out the ISP. As per usual for these systems, they're completely decentralized and under the control of the community. Truly a piece of software I would love for every modern router to ship with.
As far as TOR relevance goes, it doesnt use TOR itself, but the infrastructure behind it has anonymity built in through a similar node system. I dont understand the full scope of how deep it runs, but these links below should be able to shed light.
Link to project: https://reticulum.network/ Github page: https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum
Technically, I think the Internet is considered a mesh.
I know of nothing trying to replace the Internet, but some wireless projects like Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (technically can't use encryption on amateur radio bands), Meshtastic (messaging), MeshCore (messaging), and Reticulum (messaging, simple pages, BBS-like stuff). Any community could also try to set up a wifi mesh with something like the BATMAN protocol. Wireless meshes have all sorts of problems though. They must be carefully planned to get decent bandwidth because everyone's using the same "wire" (radio bands). Also, governments could easily jam or DoS them.
I'm not sure that helps this particular problem, since doing the hardware differently doesn't necessarily do much to prevent them from collecting information.