> But it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of treehouse

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It's actually completely fine, and good, for people to voluntarily form social groups based on a shared interests and traits. The movement to oppose this sort of thing has been a large factor in the deterioration of social life for many people. You are not entitled to membership in a community of close-knit friends.

Where did I say any of that?

I was just bemused at the webpage bragging about hosting a "24/7 LAN party" but then not even mentioning what games they like playing

Idk, probably this part?

> it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of treehouse

"We're going to write paragraphs about how cool this project is but also it's all on the LAN and it's invite-only so don't ask"

Read the manifesto, linked there and in the comments here. Its entire membership is 19 close friends and they won't let anyone new join who hasn't already been friends with one of them for at least 10 years.

They're just sharing the idea because they like what they've built and think other people could have fun building something similar. It's like a treehouse enthusiast putting some pictures of the cool treehouse they've made on their website. It's not an invitation to come and hang out in it.

I'm tempted to make one of these, TBH.

> It's like a treehouse enthusiast putting some pictures of the cool treehouse they've made on their website.

At which point you might (reasonably IMO) complain that you're rather curious what use they find for said treehouse in practice.

I suppose, if you're the sort of person whose response to finding pictures of someone's treehouse on the web is to complain there are no pictures of people playing games in it.

Context is important. If the pictures are captioned "check out this awesome treehouse I built" then yeah I don't expect anything further.

Whereas if they are captioned "this treehouse is my absolute favorite place to hang out" or "everyone should build one of these for themselves" or "building this treehouse saved my relationship" or whatever then I am going to find myself wondering why that might be.

Like if I tell you that Python is just the best language ever and you ought to be using it for approximately everything you do because it will improve your life or society or perhaps even the universe as a whole, might you not wonder _why_ I think that?

I don't know why we're even having this debate, but this thread is in response to someone literally complaining they didn't say what games they play on it (as if they necessarily even do). They've given plenty of technical info about it - certainly more than they're obliged to, which is none - and anyone who would do something like this is going to do it their own way anyway.

I'm clearly in the target audience as I'm now considering doing something like this. The page gives me all the information I need or want.

Probably because I'm in the same camp as the person you originally responded to. It's an intriguing project and clearly a lot of effort has gone into it so I'm left wondering about how it's being used. If I were going to build something similar (as they advocate) what might I use it for?

> around half of the people on the LAN have thermal receipt printers with open access, for printing out quips or jokes on each other’s counters.

> there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”.

The above is from the linked essay about the current sordid state of the internet. It gives a few ideas for fun pastimes but honestly not a lot. Gaming with close friends is probably the majority of what I'd use a LAN setup like this for so naturally I'm left curious what I might be missing out on.

You could play any game on it. How's that?

I guess you're not into networking? If so, perhaps what seems obvious to me isn't obvious to you: the network is the toy. Building it is the game. The purpose isn't the things you can do with it, it's how you do them and who you do them with. Two cans and a piece of string is still fun in the age of cellphones, and a treehouse is still fun to be in when you have a nice living room with a telly.

If the idea of setting up one of these doesn't sound like fun in its own right, I wouldn't recommend attempting it.

You might just want to look at setting up a friends only WireGuard, or Tailscale network.

I mean yes, that is how I currently play games but the question was if there were activities other than video games that these guys were using their network for.

NetBird is also worth a look—FOSS and can be self-hosted.

Same reason as any other LAN party though. Like, you (average HN user) probably would wonder what's in the treehouse. But show it to a 9 year old and they'll say: fuck yeah, awesome treehouse, I want one. Filling it with activities comes later.

DN42 (https://dn42.network/) is kind of like this but public, mostly used to play with networking technologies though you could also use it to make a virtual LAN party.

Note: If you do, you should probably check the paths your traffic takes and get consent of everyone on the path, since most people expect to mostly pass network-control traffic and some nodes have very limited bandwidth. Fortunately, AS-paths in DN42 are usually quite short. If all your LAN party traffic is confined to your own network then obviously it's not a problem.

If you built one of these you could also connect it to DN42 as-is, being aware more people will be able to access your network if not firewalled.

I didn't think there were others doing this out there, but yes, do this for sure. It's a lot of fun. Write about it too. I'm going to write up ours.

I don't see how this is any different from someone sharing a homelab setup or something.

That'll be because essentially it's no different.

“A friend group with an idea to share”

Yeah I was just wondering what they play

It doesn't necessarily look like something that was built to be submitted to HN or be interesting to outsiders.

Seems more like a semi-private friends-of-friends network. It wouldn't be surprising if it turned out to have skewed representations as most of these do by nature of the semi-private nature.

What gave you that impression?

> The Promised LAN is a closed, membership only network...

I can't tell what you are trying to add to the conversation here, or of it's just sarcasm.

I was teasing you and the op because you both made hedges ("seems", "sounds") when it was very clearly stated in the very first eight words of the first sentence of the first paragraph on that site.

I've never tried to join, so I don't know how exclusive it is. There are private clubs and groups that you just need to ask and they'll let you join. Others do a lot of vetting. If it's the former, it's not all that private.

You should read the article and the linked manifesto, because they are very clear that it’s none of that.

I already did read the article and I did not get that impression. If it's really that small and private, why mamke a website about it for friends and prospective members? Why architecture the network in a way that favors scaling, including mulitple backbone nodes running diverse software with the option to add more? Clearly these indicate thats it's not that small or exclusive. I would bet that if you were to bump into someone at DEF CON and they were a member, all you'd have to do to join is say "that's so cool, how can I join".

It is as small as it says. BGP/IPSec might be silly at its size, but it was also the path of least resistance given the background of the people in the Bureau of Lan Management. I guess it was also for lolz to see if these things could be made stable and reliable without the big-organization clownery that we constantly run into.

it's made clear from the outset this article is not attempting to recruit members, but to promote the concept

This seems like way to much effort for playing video games which can be done easier with discord. With how tight lipped they are with what their actual service is, it gives off file sharing vibes.

Or, hear me out, it's just a group of nerdy friends that wanted to hack something together.

This is exactly what it is. There's no weird file-sharing stuff going on.

It's a LAN party. Of course there is.

No games are played on TPL. It's more just socializing. There's IRC and stuff, and people host weird things.

When you join TPL you get a generated LaTeX document with all your connection-specific details. That document breaks down kind of _everything_ you need to know to join, and then you're paired up with one of those primary backbone people to connect.

Why would you assume they play games instead of socializing? Talking about no girls allowed...