WiFi 6 has made this a lot more viable than it used to be. I’ve done a fair amount of parking lot leeching and new gear is worth it.

Back when I was housing insecure but still had a place of my own to live, I first set up a point-to-point wifi link to some kids across the street to defray my internet expenses - they paid part of my bill instead of having their own internet. That was more than a decade ago and the hardware & software weren’t so reliable. When the arrangement fell apart and I no longer could pay the bill, I cracked the network of some neighbors in my building and used the same antenna to provide internet for myself and 3 others in my house for about a year. The neighbors were a nice young couple so I did my best to be decent about it - set up an always-on permanent VPN and used flow control to limit our max throughput.

It’s still possible to do this, and I’m still broke, so after a few years not needing to do any such thing, I cracked a network to have internet during a housesitting gig (house did not have internet).

Edit: get WiFi 6 or better gear for this. Trust me, the improvement in performance in marginal situations is well worth it. WiFi 6 was a big improvement over WiFi 5, which was a big improvement over WiFi 4, when it comes to staying connected and getting data across a dodgy link. I haven’t done much straight up piracy lately but I have done plenty of leeching in parking lots, and WiFi 6 gear is absolutely worth the money.

Pirating wifi doesn’t preclude any of this. See also the GL.iNet devices, such as the GL-MT3000.

Right, and my ideal situation is that all the low-quality ones stay on .world and the rest filter out to join us on smaller instances.

Just instance-block .world, as the reddit refugees end up there, the least worst will naturally filter out to other smaller instances in a helpful Darwinian selection process

my treat: I am going to be sad when I can no longer access an 18th century or earlier king’s ransom in spices for a mostly bearable cost at walmart. we’re getting there slowly but surely. as another example, olive oil costs so much now 😑

One thing I really like about the author’s fedi coverage, he doesn’t kowtow to rank stupidity and avoid mentioning alternatives because of hivemind disapproval.

From a publisher (user) perspective, Nostr’s censorship resistance by design blows the doors off of what ActivityPub can claim in that regard. And I say that as someone who’s been pretty much all-in on ActivityPub fedi since its inception (almost a decade, wow)