LoRaCS: A Long Range (LoRa) Community System
LoRaCS is a new digital commons. A secure, independent connective tissue for local communities.
Using LoRa communication as a backbone, sites are, by nature, light, local,
and free from digital landlords; it's an internet without owners. Without a "land tax", services don't need
to extract value from users to survive. The cost of participating in LoRaCS is a cheap microcontroller.
There are a handful of other emergent properties that rise out of this system that are discussed here,
many of which resolve or otherwise sidestep many bugs of the modern internet.
Primarily hosting personal sites and forums, LoRaCS is a way to express yourself and connect with your local community.
In this paradigm, if you can reach someone digitally, you can likely also reach them physically without much trouble.
It binds the digital to the physical, bringing a notion of locality back to the web.
To completely admonish the modern internet wouldn't be fair, but an alternative needs to exist.
LoRaCS, in its simplicity, promises to deliver local connection. Nothing less and nothing more.
This project is still in the early stages of development, but will see rapid development in Summer 2026.
Background
At the turn of the century, in the wake of the dot-com bubble collapse, companies hosting web services
could no longer rely on investor funding to maintain their sites.
The internet was no longer a place to communicate freely, a passionate wild west; it had to be viable business.
The economic structures that underpin the modern internet, the invasive and expansive sale of user data and attention, were a natural step to take
given the centralized and hierarchal nature of internet infrastructure. A choice was made to run ads on virtually all web content.
This new internet, known as Web 2.0, is tough to escape. Our world is progressively leaving the physical behind for a frictionless, highly-efficient digital
that promises endless entertainment and connection, an ever-acclerating torrent of information that grabs on tight and doesn't like letting go.
Worse yet, the companies running their businesses on this infrastructure are incentivised to make these systems efficient, pervasively integrated,
and as consumptive of as much of your life as possible. It's how they stay alive. It's just the business model.
Purpose
LoRaCS strives to be something else. It is immune to monetization, geographically bounded,
and runs atop entirely independent, decentralized hardware. Low throughput and high latency,
inherent properties of LoRa data transmission, mean that LoRaCS services are restricted to
light, static sites. No endless scroll, no tracking pixels, no dynamic advertisements.
Just a tool. An independent tool that you own, that you use at your own discretion, and that
exists to faciliate communication between you and your local community.
Description
LoRaCS runs as two components, a client that let's you surf the local net, and a gateway that connects you to it.
The Client
This is just a web browser that is programmed to understand the LoRaCS markup language, display styles that are encoded in said language, and provide an interface to see and request content from your local net. It's the user facing component of LoRaCS.
The Gateway
This is the hardware that talks with the local net, requesting and sending data as prompted by the client. It runs as a user-space server that uses a LoRaCS-native protocol stack for efficient, encrypted communication that's programmed to make the most out of the underlying LoRa protocol hardware.
More Links
This has been the broad overview, but there's a lot more! If you're interested in setting up your own LoRaCS node,
the philosophy that underlies the project, or the technical details, take a look here!
Setting up your own node: Github
Philosophy of LoRaCS: link
Technical details: link
~ Jess Morton (2026)