LoRaCS: A Long Range (LoRa) Communication Service
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 net infrastructure. A choice was made to run ads on virtually all web content.
We're now living in the world that resulted from that choice.
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 as efficient as possible
while trying to consume 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. A 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)