WAR chaos: yunohost and the big fall of the internet

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Due to the chaos that can be seen on the international horizon, I am considering the following scenario:
“Someone” could cut the cables under the ocean and destroy the telecommunications satellites.
Result: The Internet is broken into several pieces that cannot communicate with each other.
As we are used to working this would be a disaster.
Assuming you have a yunohost iso at home, it could be installed, but most apps could not be installed because their “pieces” are scattered around the world and cannot be accessed. Think of github, python, ruby, etc… and the thousands of dependencies that go into installing something.

Imagine that you live in France, and you want to install for example peertube or wordpress, but you can’t because the installation script requires some dependencies that are on some server in the United States and there is no way to communicate with it… at least for a few months, until the companies repair the cables under the ocean.

Proposal: Since there is already a yunohost ISO, all the apps with all their dependencies could also be added so that it is a system independent of the correct functioning of the current internet.
This same ISO would also be used to use yunohost and its apps within an intranet, although this would only be used for testing or for small private networks.

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You can take it a step further and store all the internet on your home server. But that seems to defeat the purpose of the internet. :sweat_smile:

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I am quite curious how much space and resource that would require on a server. We’d need to replicate the YunoHost-Apps GitHub organization, GitHub dependencies, and all Debian dependencies.

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And … depending on the apps : all npm and pip and composer dependencies :eyes:

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Personally I would take the question the other way around and ask why would someone want to host specific apps when the global Internet is down … I mean surely if the entire Internet is down, imho your main concern in life won’t be to start a brand new Mastodon or Matrix instance … Imho you will want any simple, basic chat software (eg IRC) or any simple website to publish info … all of this assuming that there is indeed a need to do this, because if the internet is down more than a few days, this means shit just hit the fan really hard and you’ll probably more concerned about food / shelter / future of the world than internet stuff i guess …

But beyond that, the question of (re)building a “low-tech”~ish internet is pretty interesting. It also raises the question of what we really need when computer resources (eg battery, RAM, internet connectivity) are not as abundant as right now. Right now everything is so dependent directly or indirectly from being able to download a bunch of stuff over the internet to install anything …

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The question is very interesting and important.
If the internet goes down, what is the use of an instance of mastodon?.. I think mastrodon is not going to be of any use.

But there are other apps that are going to be useful, and a lot!
I’m talking about for example Wordpress and Peertube

Wordpress is going to serve to pass information to the population and Peertube?.. clearly not to show videos of kittens, but rather to learn how to cultivate an urban garden, set up a biodigester, repair an engine, distil alcohol, refine biodiesel. … etc.

I have 3 instances of peertube with thousands and thousands of videos in Spanish, to learn everything, from DIY, through masonry, farming, animal husbandry, butchery, recipes, mechanics, repairs…
The videos are in 360p, a sufficient resolution to learn and that takes up little space on the disk
I also have the entire wikipedia, a personal wordpress, a web radio with libretime and icecast, I can broadcast live video, and a few other interesting things.
Ideally, there should be many instances in many languages ​​so that if something happens to the internet, you can still have access to something useful.
It is unlikely that the internet will go down in the interior of the state and the internet will probably continue to operate at a low rate in Europe, but we must consider that we have energy problems and that it is very likely that the data centers will be turned off… goodbye to google/youtube/ facebook/twitter, but also telegram, whatsapp.

Only the institutional web pages and a few more will remain active… like mine for example.

Back to the topic of resources. It is obvious that over time the devices are going to break, starting with the smartphones, but the computers will continue to work for many years.
For energy you don’t have to worry too much. Perhaps the cities will be the hardest hit, but peripheral areas have access to solar panels, lead batteries and biogas. So some computers will be able to continue working… and yunohost comes in fully here.

It is clear that a private data line cannot supply thousands of connections. To do this we have to create a federation of teams in the territory and replicate videos, documents and database.

But how are we going to create other instances if precisely the international internet is dead?

Hence the need to have a way to have a large yunohost ISO,

Maybe it is not necessary to have all yunohost apps, but rather a selection, such as:

Peertube
WordPress
kiwix
mumble
Redirect (nginx proxy)
round cube
… and little else according to what people may need in a vote.

Greetings and sorry for the very long text

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:slight_smile: I have a mirror of debian, fdroid, ando some git repository, but is impossible have all dependencies of pip, pyton, npm, etc…

So the necessity to have a snapshot of the principals apps of yunohost

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this is like an ‘offline’ or ‘air-gapped’ version of yunohost server that you are looking at.

Does anyone has already try to install yunohost server with no internet on ?

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Maybe using the debian tor repos may help update the system in that scenario.

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actually with VM and CI you can create a raw file (or qcow2 or ever) that would be able to be deployed later on and will have included all needed dependencies already…

like a snapshot of stable standard yunohost, you could have this done weekly or so

that won’t be magical but could offer a great start…at least to have existing dependencies in a stable and recent state

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