Self hosting helps make the internet more decentralized, but at the end of the day someone else owns that series of tubes.
This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cool if we self hosted not just servers but networking infrastructure as well.
I have an extra class amateur radio license and one of the many niches within the ham radio hobby I'm interested in is packet radio and wireless mesh networking.
Packet radio could technically refer to any RF communication that uses packets, including wifi, but I mostly see it used to refer to the AX.25 protocol, which works like an old-school dial-up modem in that it converts data into audio tones that are transmitted using FM or single sideband radios built for voice communication. AX.25 is used mostly nowadays in Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) which is used to report location and status info. There's a website, aprs.fi, where you can track vehicles sending their location or weather stations reporting conditions and so on.
In the olden days there were tons of bulletin boards hosted over AX.25 all over the globe that you could reach either directly or through repeaters. There are a few hangers on, and I even hosted one for a while but nobody visited. You could by hardware terminal node controllers (TNCs) that had a BBS feature, and nowadays there are a few software TNCs available.
Several Wifi frequency bands overlap with ham bands, and various projects have arisen that modify commercial wifi gear to turn them into mesh nodes forming a wireless wide area network, operating under FCC part 97 rules rather than the unlicensed part 15 rules that they use out of the box. This allows higher power and channels otherwise off limits to wifi stations. The project I'm most familiar with is Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) which uses a fork of openWRT firmware. I've tried a couple times to get the other hams in my area interested in setting up a network, but it's slow going.
There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I'm not as familiar with.
This barely scratches the surface of what's out there. The ham bands are explicitly non commercial and there are limits on what you can transmit and how much bandwidth you can use, but I dream of a day when everyone's wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we'd be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.
Why do you think an independent ISP would operate any differently at the networking level on a per-customer basis? This is basic network segmentation, and my home gear can do that pretty easily. Throw each customer on their own vlan that's a /30 and they can't do anything more than talk from their node to the central router.
Good firewalls make good digital neighbors, and an independent ISP isn't going to survive long if Alice can access Bob's home network over the ISP without having something specifically configured in Bob's network to allow that.
Oh I get how it would all work, I'm not into sharing my network. lol I did have to provision a separate vlan for my lady friend when she comes over so she can get her fill of all the advertisements she wants, but, there are direct benefits of such a compromise in this instance. ;)
See, I'm struggling to think that you do. You're not sharing your network with anyone. You're just hooking your uplink into someone else's network, who will take as much (or more, given how fucky current ISPs are) care to keep you and your neighbors from talking to each other without your own config letting it happen.
At the risk of being a contrarian, why would I want to hook my uplink to someone else's network, or vice versa?
Well, the biggest reason I could think of is that you want to access the Internet.
Your local network is only as good as the services you run, and most people don't self host. If you choose not to hook your uplink to your ISPs network, you're not gonna be able to do all that much.
I think you might be misunderstanding something here, because this is already how every ISP works - including the one you are using right now. Just on a bigger scale.