xj9 [they/them, she/her]

we need significantly more resilient communications infrastructure. though this applies equally to disaster prep since the internet is extremely fragile. i see this as a problem with a bunch of parts, but some of the main pieces look like this to me:

1. organizing computers (spare phones, spare laptops, actual server hardware) into cloud-like infrastructure components
2. writing software that actually works well running on trash (fediverse nodes really hate it when hostnames change, so hexbear itself may not adapt well if the domain gets seized. they aren’t a good match for disaster services either since you can’t guarantee that global DNS will work)
3. building overlay networks to connect nodes over the internet (yggdrasil+i2p looks like a winner in the short term)
4. building a physical mesh network to link nearby computers together over fast links (BATMAN for no se vende mesh here in LA)
5. developing a mobile adhoc mesh routing protocol that can setup a usable internet using only smartphones that interoperates with the fixed mesh noted in 4 (this will likely replace BATMAN, but is also a research problem and would represent a novel capability)

there are a bunch of shitty mesh apps and hardware components out there that may also be applicable, but its hard to get anything useful out of them without more planning and coordination. (meshtastic, briar, secure scuttlebutt, simplex, et al. come to mind)

i’ve been working on minibase for the micro-cloud component in an experimental capacity for years using alpine linux (just cuz i like it), but I’ve recently started working on a production version based on nix.

No offense, but free desktop seems like a pile of trash. I’d rather run android user space.

I admittedly use KDE and I’ve only experimented with Linux x86 as a desktop environment, but it seems like free desktop is in a perpetual state of barely being usable by both devs and users.

It seems like Linux laptops serve like “pro users” and they don’t really care about the entry or mid range price point. You really have to go for the netbook enthusiasts club computers to get something affordable, but it’ll be super under powered and run on a random ISC. Probably arm64, but maybe MIPS or RISC-V depending.

That said, Pine64 does have pretty cute little netbooks for like 100 USD and there’s extra space inside the enclosure for secret notes and stickers.

Alpine with KDE on my personal computer, a lightly modded librem 13 gen1 (not a brand i recomend). For client work I use Manjaro and some kind of Dell laptop.

i have a shitty little fork of inferno that i do a lot of my blogging and stuff with. currently runs in docker on my personal computer because i haven’t had the time to figure out how to get it building or running under musl libc.

deleted by creator

afaik he was pushed out of mozilla over the same 1k dono

millennials were doing that in their 20s though. it was a whole drama with some of my friends when i switched to android back in the day (5-8 years ago, mind). you just want to be a grumpy old.