One more thing, this Diaspora app is still going to live in layers 3 & 4 of the OSI model. I'd love to see a project start at layer 1.

Good questions. I have done some thinking about this :)

For starters, if it ever happens and they cut the cable, us old BBS folks will be communicating within days. With modern Yaggi antennas and direction mast mount antennas, we could quickly get neighborhoods and even cities online. The problem will be linking cities together... for instance, Phoenix to Tucson. I was talking to one of my shortwave buddies (I haven't started messing with shortwave yet, but its getting close) and he is also a network engineer. He's fairly certain that we could get at least modem speeds over shortwave with massive amounts of error correction going on.

Necessity is the mother of invention. When the cord goes away, things will suck, but we will be back online... and hopefully without a middle man.

 As far as this Diaspora, I see this as something to replace Facebook. I hope it takes off. Did you watch their little video? If not, they talk about how as humans we communicate face to face... but online, we have to go through a middle man. time to get RID of the middle man :)

LoTek, can you provide any answer to the problem of when "they" cut the cable?

What I see will happen is we have to somehow think of an "alternet" on the physical and topographical level, independent of current infrastrcure. That's the way I see it.

So LoTek, what's the current way of thinking? Will we be depandant on shortwave/analogue? And what technologies do we have at our disposal that are truly fault-tolerant?

Free market backlash towards the Big Brother / anti-privacy social media networks. I love it!