This was posted on the other site. It can be found below on this post.
They talk about how even Jellyfin & Jitsi were valuable for dealing with government’s actions in shutting down the internet. Does anything else come to mind? In addition to giving advice, can we host anything to help people in this kind of situation?
Suddenly our Self Hosted application became more than just hobby.
If you already don’t know, Bangladesh was disconnected from the internet for majority of the last week due to government order. It was shut down without any warning. We were put under curfew 24/7, so no leaving home.
On the second day of curfew, me, with nothing to do, figured the intranet in our country still worked. So I opened my Jellyfin service up and gave access to my immediate family and friends. Then we had people stepping up. One opened a simple chat application. Believe me, I never felt happier reading messages from a bunch of random people on the internet. Once people started communicating it only got better. We had a jitsi meet up and running within a few hours. People opened up their media library. Last couple of days, I almost didn’t miss the traditional internet.
I have to thank you guys for all the encouragement. Also I do have a few questions for you guys.
I’m fearing this will not be the last time we will be blocked from the world. What can we do to make things even better next time? One major problem was TLS CERTS stopped working. So the communication was in http using IP address
What are some apps to host if the same situation to arise again?
Sorry for the bad English, not my first language.
I like this way of thinking! Excited to see what smarter people than myself come up with
If you already don’t know, Bangladesh was disconnected from the internet for majority of the last week due to government order. It was shut down without any warning. We were put under curfew 24/7, so no leaving home. On the second day of curfew, me, with nothing to do, figured the intranet in our country still worked.
Anyone know more about that? Is that just customer-to-customer communication?
I’ve been fortunate enough to never experience a government-mandated internet shutdown, but I figure the ISPs just disconnect the gateways. If I’m understanding that correctly, it sounds like they just used the ISP network to carry traffic internally. Very clever!
I am curious too. It has been hard to get much information out between the internet shutdown, the language barrier, and the lack of press freedoms. I will post a link if I find anything!
Briar
Not self hosted but it is great for bad situations.
If you have some technical neighbors you could work to create a mesh. Get a bunch of devices and mesh them together to create a internal network spanning your neighborhood. You could theoretically have thousands of nodes. This may get you in trouble though so stick to Briar when threatened
One thing that comes to mind is an NTP server, or if you have a beefy server, you could host maps
have you seen https://meshtastic.org/, going to look into some devices as a backup
Jeff Geerling did a video on them, got me super interested and thinking on how to implement and use with family.
