The Internet has changed a lot in the last 40+ years. Fads have come and gone. Network protocols have been designed, deployed, adopted, and abandoned. Industries have come and gone. The types of people on the internet have changed a lot. The number of people on the internet has changed a lot, creating an information medium unlike anything ever seen before in human history. There’s a lot of good things about the Internet as of 2025, but there’s also an inescapable hole in what it used to be, for me.

I miss being able to throw a site up to send around to friends to play with without worrying about hordes of AI-feeding HTML combine harvesters DoS-ing my website, costing me thousands in network transfer for the privilege. I miss being able to put a lightly authenticated game server up and not worry too much at night – wondering if that process is now mining bitcoin. I miss being able to run a server in my home closet. Decades of cat and mouse games have rendered running a mail server nearly impossible. Those who are “brave” enough to try are met with weekslong stretches of delivery failures and countless hours yelling ineffectually into a pipe that leads from the cheerful lobby of some disinterested corporation directly into a void somewhere 4 layers below ground level.

I miss the spirit of curiosity, exploration, and trying new things. I miss building things for fun without having to worry about being too successful, after which “security” offices start demanding my supplier paperwork in triplicate as heartfelt thanks from their engineering teams. I miss communities that are run because it is important to them, not for ad revenue. I miss community operated spaces and having more than four websites that are all full of nothing except screenshots of each other.

Every other page I find myself on now has an AI generated click-bait title, shared for rage-clicks all brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors–completely covered wall-to-wall with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy, with the real content hidden at the bottom bracketed by deceptive ads served by companies that definitely know which new coffee shop I went to last month.

This is wrong, and those who have seen what was know it.

I can’t keep doing it. I’m not doing it any more. I reject the notion that this is as it needs to be. It is wrong. The hole left in what the Internet used to be must be filled. I will fill it.

What comes before part b?

Throughout the 2000s, some of my favorite memories were from LAN parties at my friends’ places. Dragging your setup somewhere, long nights playing games, goofing off, even building software all night to get something working—being able to do something fiercely technical in the context of a uniquely social activity. It wasn’t really much about the games or the projects—it was an excuse to spend time together, just hanging out. A huge reason I learned so much in college was that campus was a non-stop LAN party – we could freely stand up servers, talk between dorms on the LAN, and hit my dorm room computer from the lab. Things could go from individual to social in the matter of seconds. The Internet used to work this way—my dorm had public IPs handed out by DHCP, and my workstation could serve traffic from anywhere on the internet. I haven’t been back to campus in a few years, but I’d be surprised if this were still the case.

In December of 2021, three of us got together and connected our houses together in what we now call The Promised LAN. The idea is simple—fill the hole we feel is gone from our lives. Build our own always-on 24/7 nonstop LAN party. Build a space that is intrinsically social, even though we’re doing technical things. We can freely host insecure game servers or one-off side projects without worrying about what someone will do with it.

Over the years, it’s evolved very slowly—we haven’t pulled any all-nighters. Our mantra has become “old growth”, building each layer carefully. As of May 2025, the LAN is now 19 friends running around 25 network segments. Those 25 networks are connected to 3 backbone nodes, exchanging routes and IP traffic for the LAN. We refer to the set of backbone operators as “The Bureau of LAN Management”. Combined decades of operating critical infrastructure has driven The Bureau to make a set of well-understood, boring, predictable, interoperable and easily debuggable decisions to make this all happen. Nothing here is exotic or even technically interesting.

Applications of trusting trust

The hardest part, however, is rejecting the idea that anything outside our own LAN is untrustworthy—nearly irreversible damage inflicted on us by the Internet. We have solved this by not solving it. We strictly control membership—the absolute hard minimum for joining the LAN requires 10 years of friendship with at least one member of the Bureau, with another 10 years of friendship planned. Members of the LAN can veto new members even if all other criteria is met. Even with those strict rules, there’s no shortage of friends that meet the qualifications—but we are not equipped to take that many folks on. It’s hard to join—-both socially and technically. Doing something malicious on the LAN requires a lot of highly technical effort upfront, and it would endanger a decade of friendship. We have relied on those human, social, interpersonal bonds to bring us all together. It’s worked for the last 4 years, and it should continue working until we think of something better.

We assume roommates, partners, kids, and visitors all have access to The Promised LAN. If they’re let into our friends' network, there is a level of trust that works transitively for us—I trust them to be on mine. This LAN is not for “security”, rather, the network border is a social one. Benign “hacking”—in the original sense of misusing systems to do fun and interesting things—is encouraged. Robust ACLs and firewalls on the LAN are, by definition, an interpersonal—not technical—failure. We all trust every other network operator to run their segment in a way that aligns with our collective values and norms.

Over the last 4 years, we’ve grown our own culture and fads—around half of the people on the LAN have thermal receipt printers with open access, for printing out quips or jokes on each other’s counters. It’s incredible how much network transport and a trusting culture gets you—there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”.

DIY

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.