The Promised LAN

The Promised LAN is a bit of a WAN party, but I would say that "LAN party" can certainly be assumed to include virtual LANs.

In fact I'm even willing to say that a get-together of friends in the same location playing the same online game (perhaps on laptops or mobile devices) still fits the spirit of the LAN party even though it's technically over the WAN.

The best LAN party is the one that you are part of.

This is a pretty amazing setup! I think in 2025 I would definitely prefer something like this. However, I think back in "the day" part of what made LAN parties fun was that everyone's PC was so individualized. I remember all of my high school friends and I coming of age and building our PCs. I helped a lot of my friends build their PCs and we all chose different things (such as the amount of RGB LEDs, which I thought were tacky...). I remember a friend of a friend had a water cooling system and I was so excited about checking it out. Also, things like the desktop wallpaper you chose, etc, contributed to this. There was something very magical about it all. Lugging our PCs to each others houses was a real labor of love.

That website was a very fun read :) what a cool place and so awesome to have so many friends to play with.

This line made me chuckle:

> I suggested to Jade: Should we move to Austin? Jade initially said no, because she wanted our kids to benefit from Palo Alto's school district. At the time, it was rated #12 in the nation. But, looking closer at the rankings revealed a surprise: The Eanes school district in Austin was #8. When I showed this to Jade, she changed her mind.

Could tell your wife was Chinese without even seeing the name. Chinese parents will made radical housing decisions for their children, even just to move from #12 to #8, lol. Love this.

Big fan of both your LAN houses! One thing I noticed is that you don't seem to have any art/pictures/decorations on any of your walls. Is that an intentional choice?

Hybrid LANs are also pretty good. During the Christmas-New Year break, old school friends would often have a LAN party with ZeroTier or similar set up, so people who couldn't make it could still drop in and out. You'd get a great LAN party vibe from the room full of PCs and ethernet cables everywhere, but you'd also get much higher player counts. Everyone wins.

Hah! OP feels more like a WAN party :P

Haha, have to drop the link to the recent Linus Tech Tips video on your house!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Y0MVUgjOw

Funnily enough the (only) LAN parties I ever experienced "back in the day" were pretty similar to yours:

1. there was one smallish computer lab tucked under a stairs in the science department in university, in which all of the computers had been "compromised" in some fashion & games installed for student LAN parties. Mainly after hours for those living on campus.

2. In the first tiny little company I ever worked for we'd have them in the office on occasion.

For your "traditional" types - how did people transport their computers? Laptops?

Interesting! I grew up before network cards was a thing in home computers (Commodore 64 and Amiga), but a group of my friends organized what we called «meetings» which I would characterize as your traditional LAN party. I remember at some point that we hooked up two Amigas over a fairly long parallel cable and were able to send data across. Cannot recall if we actually were able to copy larger files between them though. Fun times!

Looks like a nice setup, but ideally the room should be like 25% of that size. Being almost uncomfortably close to each other is a feature :).

If you aren’t using IPX/SPX, it isn’t a real LAN party.

Or there’s true Scotsman all the way down to the turtle.

To me, one of the defining features of a LAN party is a single broadcast domain. I thought that is what this was, at first, but it is actually an L3 overlay network with DNS and BGP and the whole nine yards. Somewhat a stretch for a LAN. :D

People move far away but still want to participate in LAN parties.

Jesus fuck.

Obviously, as you predicted, the first reaction is "how do you afford all of that", which is a silly question, because the answer is "just be in the right place in the right moment".

Now, the second question is how do you get to actually organize a big party? My experience is that in modern times it's very difficult to maintain an extensive social network. First, people live far away from each other, so visiting someone becomes a journey. Second, people have shit to do, and when you invite them for a beer it usually means asking them to give up something else in that time (like taking care of their kids). Third, in the age of hyperindividualism it's difficult to meet people you vibe with, because everyone has their own distinct personality and the era of shared values and hobbies seems to be gone.

I think your definition/setup is the wrongest as it does not capture the spirit. You have a cyber café.

Thanks for linking that, I missed it when skimming the original link earlier. I find that quite a heart warming story which makes me want to set up something similar, I was particularly tickled by the thermal receipt printers for sending each other messages.

Actually the manifesto is linked in the second paragraph. Reading this page and then the manifesto was good experience for me.

Wow. This is the best part of it. Thanks.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

They probably use L2TP with IPsec to get Layer 2 transit. Doing that over Wireguard would require Gretep or something similar

My personal choice for something like this would be Tailscale/Headscale. Runs over Wireguard and handles a ton of niceties like DNS for connected nodes automatically.

I mean, this is pretty much the standard of setting up satellite offices for businesses and whatnot. Lots of people are extremely familiar with IPSec, it's not that hard.

dn42 is really fun tinkering with, it feels very much like connecting to the real internet.

The set of internal services is growing too.

Some people have just opened up their entire home networks, other people have VLANs set up and only share that VLAN with TPL. However, as written in the article, everyone knows at least a few other people on TPL and that interpersonal real life trust is what keeps people from screwing around on everyone else's networks. Everyone is also an adult.

Eh, I'm not sure how gimmicky it is. Without knowing how it's used, maybe the use of the network itself is just for fun, and nothing wrong with doing computer stuff for fun!

But the networking chops to set something like this up are super practical. My current project has forced me to go from "i know how to use sockets in serious applications" to "i run GCE instance snapshots unmodified in a kernel-level TAP web of lies with tricky DNS overlaid to migrate complex workloads that can't go down to bare metal instances colocated in weird places". This is a pretty radical shift in perspective for a historical "network stuff, got it" guy like me.

In the words of that guy from the 10x programmer meme video: "cloud edge is a hype!" The cloud is terrible in 2025: arthritic Xeon SKUs no one wants marked up 10000%, FinOps is like a casino that knows the whales need to neither win too much nor lose too much: they have active calls to action when the grift is so insane that they know you'll eventually do the books and churn out forever. The security theatre around IAM and shit is like going to the DMV, it's a whole thing to make an S3 bucket now.

There are bright spots: fly is the perfect tool for a busy admin who needs to keep an eye on a bunch of prompt engineers with docker and confidence, but for the most part?

Going back to bare metal is just a strict upgrade, and once you do that, knowledge like the knowledge these folks have from operating this thing? It becomes a whole new set of superpowers over and above standard out of the box networking. Standard networking is great when it meets your needs, but if it's all you know, you don't realize how big on an appetite your business has for wizard stuff.

The idea is to be a space where existing social groups play, rather than a wider community - it's inherently based on a level of pre-existing trust. Writing about it is supposed to be an incentive for people to build their own little spaces where they can share weird stuff that should never be near the public internet - it's cool to have a network of thermal printers that people can submit jokes to, but it only really works if access is somewhat limited.

>As a result, membership will never be open, and we will never have enough connected LANs to deal with the technical and social problems that start to happen with scale. This is a feature, not a bug.

>This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN. Connect it with friends’ homes. Remember what is missing from your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate and get it running. Build slowly. Build your community. Do it with joy.

From https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/

Read the linked manifesto. I think the idea is to inspire you to set up your own, rather than join this one.

It's not really custom. It's industry standard protocols for connecting independent (one might say "autonomous") networks.

Tailscale is this on easy mode, of course. There's a blog post by apenwarr somewhere that I can't find right now that lays out the fundamental thesis of Tailscale and its very similar to these folks' manifesto.

The custom jiggery pokery is the point. This is like telling someone to throw away their hobby car they work on over the weekends and replace it with a new electric vehicle because it'll, "Just work." The configuring things, understanding the infrastructure, that is _the point_.

Yes, everyone is pretty technical. The author of this article (ptag) spends a decent amount of time helping the people out who aren't as well-versed in infrastructure/networking.

This is one of those cases where the work is the fun. It just depends on your personal definition of ‘work’ and ‘fun’.