Strangely enough, that's one of the big draws for me. I'm "on the spectrum" and often find face-to-face socialisation and making new contacts very draining. I tend to prefer systems to people - although as time went on, I realised one of the things I really enjoy about DN42 is making the human contacts!
After getting started with the various "auto peering" systems, I've been making much more of an effort to find individual operators[1], and add myself to the peerfinder and hang out on IRC.
It really does feel like the "old internet" and while the technology and learning opportunities are great, it's the people that really make the network.
[1]=If you're interested, I'm more than happy to peer with you - details at https://markround.com/dn42
Thanks for sharing, your projects look really neat! Reading your page I realize I know very little about networking at that level of the stack. That might be a good thing to dig into as a way to work around my "AI dread" (or whatever we call the feeling of "what's the point working on that project when an LLM can make it faster" I've been feeling too much lately).
That was where I started, too. I was fine with VLANs, routing in general and so on from datacenter/DevOps/Sysadmin work, but BGP and how the wider internet fitted together beyond the basics was mostly beyond me.
DN42 is a great playground for this thing - as long as you're prepared to put the effort in, it's a very friendly and helpful community. It's fun to build things for the heck of it and there's a lot of weird and wonderful stuff being worked on there.
dn42 is really cool for learning networking at the ISP level