[Freedombox-discuss] Slow Internet Connection and Inavailability

[Lars Wirzenius]

On to, 2010-08-26 at 04:23 +0300, Osama Khalid wrote:
> I was talking to a friend of mine who is interested in this project
> earlier today and he raised an interesting issue: How is it going to
> work for the many people who live in Africa, India and some regions in
> the Middle East who do not have stable, fast and permanent Internet
> access?

One of the interesting things that _could_ happen is using a reasonably
dense network of freedom boxes to build a local network which then gets
gatewayed to the larger Internet. It might be a mesh network, but until
the problems invovled in those get figured out, even one with static
routings should be possible. It only requires having enough boxes that
can talk to each other over wifi.

This is not a solution to everyone's bandwidth problems, but it might be
part of a solution.

> Also, on a similar issue, if someone is going to send me a
> photo/notice/article/whatever at a time when my server is offline,
> what should be done?

Ideally, the sender will queue the message so that when your box gets
back online it can get it later.

> Which design is going to be implemented and why?

That all depends on the people who will do the implementing. There's not
a whole lot of people working on these things yet.

On the whole, I see Freedom Box as a sub-project of Debian, and that
means mainly concentrating on system integration: we will package and
integrate and perhaps polish things that others write. So, initially,
there will be no application to replace Facebook, until someone writes
it. If Diaspora gets that done, and releases the code as free software,
we can use that.