Internet for the occasionally online
Intermittency in your bandwidth not in your sanity
2017-04-09 — 2025-06-28
Wherein strategies for preserving portions of the internet for intermittent use are presented, including Kiwix offline Wikipedias, sneakernet/file‑sync tools like git‑annex, and satellite‑delivered news to Raspberry Pi portals.
Keeping bits of the internet available for when we go off-grid. See also sneakernets, low bandwidth hacks.
This is a tricky problem, and specific partial solutions abound. Many solutions are unidirectional. For example, we can get read-only versions of Wikipedia for offline use in our remote mountain village; but there’s no easy way to contribute our updates back to the version on the main internet.
Also, we should cache the internet for offline use even if the net is nice right now, because nation-states are war gaming to destroy the internet, and we little people will suffer when that happens, and we can’t get our our YouTube instructional videos on how to survive the apocalypse after it happens.
1 Offline automatic file sync
Some of the file sync options I mentioned also work as sneakernets, for example git-annex, and Syncthing.
2 Offline Wikipedia
As far as I can tell, there’s no way to contribute upstream. But a reasonably simple, well-curated option is to use the Kiwix offline Wikipedia, which can give us everything, minus pictures, or only “medical” articles, or only “school” articles and so on.
3 Offline omnibus
Kolibri is an open-source educational platform specially designed to provide offline access to a wide range of quality, openly licensed educational resources in low-resource contexts like rural schools, refugee camps, orphanages, and non-formal school programs.
4 Offline software manuals
devdocs.io is an excellent offline cache of API docs that works in your browser.
Even more comprehensive are the specialized apps Dash (macOS, US$25) and Zeal (Linux, Windows, open source).
5 Offline news
I can’t tell if Fallback is a viable project or an art project designed to make a point. Filip Visnjic’s review gives an overview: it caches internet news in case a nation that’s monitoring net activity imposes an internet shutdown on a restive population.
Fallback is triggered by powerful forecasting algorithms providing a backup right when it is needed. “We constantly monitor the probability of Internet shutdowns worldwide” — Quifan tells CAN. The prediction is done by trend analysis of the appearance frequency of certain keywords in the online world.
[…]the system scrapes headlines and articles from news platforms, encrypts it, and sends it over satellite to the Portal devices (Raspberry Pi Zero W with E-ink Module). Portal receives data over satellite, decrypts it, formats it into news articles, and provides its own WiFi access point where no Internet is required.
6 Offline file sharing
PirateBox creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. You can think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box! PirateBox project is following a few simple goals.
This page lists certain peer projects
Yes, check out Aram Bartholl’s fantastic Dead Drops. There are also several forks of the project, including Jason Griffey’s LibraryBox (actually nearly 1:1 and working together), the Bibliobox and the CoWBox (CoWorking Box). A new C.H.I.P based PirateBox fork is AnyfestoCHIP (Project-website). In addition, there are several projects which focus on education, creating an offline network, but are not based on Piratebox: