I'm sure I'd be preaching to the choir if I told you that it's time for us to immigrate from übercorp owned social media and services. All of you have done so, so that's not the point of this post. Even though we are on these new platforms, the fediverse is still sensitive to requests from governmental bodies and organizations. Lemmy.zip has already blocked UK users and Lemmy.world will almost certainly do the same. Due to the size of Matrix's biggest homeserver matrix.org, the admins of said homeserver are beginning to follow the OSA and have already raised their minimum age to 18+. And instances who don't follow the Act could be subjected to insurmountable paperwork and even blocked from the UK, Australia and other countries enacting these outrageous laws soon.
Blocking UK users to avoid this is almost a necessity, and as Labour is attempting to get lawmakers to outlaw VPNs, we could be seeing the equivalent of the UK Great Firewall soon. However, it will take significant amounts of time, money and paperwork to outlaw VPNs and to get ISPs to block sites and protocols. This is where federated and open source platforms have an advantage, without being shackled by bureaucracy they are able to quickly adapt. But this is not sustainable, and eventually the UK will become even more overreaching in order to gain more control over people's Internet usage.
Darknets such as Tor, I2P and Yggdrasil are a potential solution, however they have multiple issues. Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load. ~~Yggdrasil is alpha software and requires IPv6, which in many countries is simply not possible to use~~. Whilst these darknets are extremely resistant to censorship from other countries, with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet, they still are not capable of handling modern Internet usage.
We might need new completely independent mediums seperate from the Internet to avoid this. Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up. All I know is that governments will not stop here. I might seem like I'm overreacting here, but we need to be prepared for what is coming.
CORRECTION: I was told by a peer that Yggdrasil peers must have IPv6, however one does not need an IPv6 enabled network to use it, they just need an IPv6 operating system/device, which virtually every modern operating system including Windows and Linux does. Yggdrasil is actually Beta software.
I strongly encourage everyone to protect the things they love, download all of Wikipedia, screenshot & download all the things. It's a little paranoid, sure, but between all of us downloading & saving all our little pieces of the web & all its information, we effectively safeguard most of it from digital terrorism, tyranny, erasure. It costs very little, relatively speaking. Do your part & I'll do mine.
I've often felt that the web should work more like Git, so you can keep the content locally and just pull updates when you need.
I have Kiwix (offline versions of Wikipedia and other online resources) and Linkwarden (preserve specific websites in multiple formats) running on my home server.
record scratch
I was under the impression linkwarden just saved... links.
Entire webpages? Do tell!
Yes! It saves it as HTML, readable HTML, PDF and image.
Results can vary a lot depending on how the page is implemented. Sometimes most of the formats are empty or broken, but I always got at least one that's usable.
Can you use it to search for old versions of web pages too?
Unless I missed that feature, no, you only have one version.
But it creates a link to archive.org so you can see if there's older versions there.
Is there an ELI5 of how Kiwix works? I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around it.
You have two things, the application and the libraries.
The libraries are files with the data you want to host (wikipedia, stack overflow, etc).
There's a lot of applications for different platforms. Some allow to download the libraries directly, otherwise you can download them manually into a folder and tell the app where to find them.
It's kind of like a PDF of a web page. But it's functional You don't have to load the whole site at once and links take you from page to page just like it did in the original website. The content is stored in monolithic ZIM files and you can get a decent selection from archive.org. But it's mostly reference material and the content is quite static.
All I have is like QWEN 3B that fits on my HDD and and an USB with memories