What self-hosted services can help during a crisis or emergency? This is for those affected OR those who want to help - eviltoast

This was posted on the other site. It can be found below on this post.

They talk about how even Jellyfin & Jitsi were valuable for dealing with government’s actions in shutting down the internet. Does anything else come to mind? In addition to giving advice, can we host anything to help people in this kind of situation?

Suddenly our Self Hosted application became more than just hobby.

If you already don’t know, Bangladesh was disconnected from the internet for majority of the last week due to government order. It was shut down without any warning. We were put under curfew 24/7, so no leaving home.

On the second day of curfew, me, with nothing to do, figured the intranet in our country still worked. So I opened my Jellyfin service up and gave access to my immediate family and friends. Then we had people stepping up. One opened a simple chat application. Believe me, I never felt happier reading messages from a bunch of random people on the internet. Once people started communicating it only got better. We had a jitsi meet up and running within a few hours. People opened up their media library. Last couple of days, I almost didn’t miss the traditional internet.

I have to thank you guys for all the encouragement. Also I do have a few questions for you guys.

I’m fearing this will not be the last time we will be blocked from the world. What can we do to make things even better next time? One major problem was TLS CERTS stopped working. So the communication was in http using IP address

What are some apps to host if the same situation to arise again?

Sorry for the bad English, not my first language.

  • MHanak@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    One thing that comes to mind is an NTP server, or if you have a beefy server, you could host maps

    • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      host maps

      It does require a beefy server (rendering tiles is CPU/RAM-intensive, storing pre-rendered tiles is expensive on storage) It should be doable on limited hardware if only a small area.

      I think the better move would be keeping/distributing a local copy of the OsmAnd android APK and a few maps for the app. Because you’ll not be able to provide map access to people from your server if the Internet/local fiber/phone network is down - this way everyone can have their own full copy of the map.

      I’m not sure about the method to extract map data from the app storage directory though.