The strongest argument for Freifunk locally:
No captive portal.
That’s just insanely the biggest benefit of the whole thing.
Everything else is secondary. I can just tell my device to connect to Freifunk. Boom, internet. No bullshit, no getting let down by some login wanting attention. And if Freifunk is somewhere else, I literally don’t have to do a thing for it.
Compare that to the city’s free WiFi in Düsseldorf, which wants a login but doesn’t tell you anywhere where to get it. Or in some subway trains where there’s no cell signal, but I have to re-captive-portal myself every 2 stations because of some nonsense. Doesn’t matter at all whether it’s address randomization or not, it wants fresh logins most of the time anyway.
The strongest argument against Freifunk as a volunteer:
Over 9000 broken local pages trying to push firmware for 2005-era e-waste on me. No contact people, or it just leads nowhere.
Miscellaneous
All this internal services stuff is really only interesting to ADHD-hoarder IT guys who buy or host every bit of junk because it feels like an indulgence against actual organization.
There’s absolutely no discovery for internal services in place. And honestly, no admin time either.
What do people even want?
- Advertise their small businesses
- Clandestine shit under the radar
- Jelly fins
Even though donation-funded sounds cool, it’s just not engaging enough. It needs pseudo-productization and some way to get money flowing back in.
We’re here in Germany, there are plenty of suckers with money who’ll take the bait for some memes.