technology

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.

finally, the dream of hexbear.su will come to fruition

lemmy or lemmygrad both have Mali domain names, decent place to regroup if they aren't taken down at the same time. I think the hosting provider is the same though. Hoping the admins in charge of the infra and with access to that account aren't US-based though

I don't know how it works with hosting but we've got both lib.rehab and chapo.chat

There are secondary / tertiary methods of contact. People have accounts on other platforms like Twitter, Matrix, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. There are other watering holes people can regain contact. The community would be utterly fractured, but such was the case when Reddit dropped the hammer on us. I think our past experience served well. Establish a life raft. Gather the troops. Plot a course forward.

That said, we were relatively lucky last time. The regime of censorship has sharpened significantly in the past four years since then. If the US government were to lean on Hexbear's ISP (or domain registrar), a life raft on a service like Discord would fold like a house of cards (not to mention being 100% wiretapped). We would need more robust options. There is the Matrix server, but it is tied up with the same infrastructure. The people who use it have accounts distributed among various Matrix servers though.