Okay, so I’m old. And I miss the BBS era, where long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive so local communities sprang up around electronic watering-holes that were within range of a free local call.
And it occurs to me, if I’m already hoisting a wifi mast to make my Othernet node available across the neighborhood, why not toss a local messageboard in there too? I’ll throw a sticky post at the top explaining how it’s not the internet and messages can only be seen by other users on this local node, and see what happens.
How would I go about adding an icon to the Skylark interface; is that allowed/encouraged/supported? Or should I make the BBS entirely separate, so my captive portal invites users to “click here for Othernet” or “click this other link for the local bulletin board” but never the twain shall meet?
I like it; and I also have fond memories of the old days of BBS.
The Othernet stations are supposed to be useful community and education center magnets; so like old shared time unix systems and BBSs this makes total sense with rotated deletes and news, perhaps including the satellite delivered news about outernet as was mentioned here. Fido/NNTP echomail/news
If we are already talking BBS and local mail I also feel that adding a semi or fully automated USB stick combined fidonet/sneakernet delivery system so someone can ‘take the mail to town’ as is already a proven solution among the technical but unwired black market sneakernet in Cuba or the DPRK, again addressing the the specific access problem that Outernet is helping to solve.
If we are really looking to engineer a simple solution that NGOs can hand off to less net-savvy end users perhaps an image customized for a pocket sized ‘mailbox’; a Pi-W, case with rechargeable battery and one external USB port for rugged flash drives, an on/deliver button, several status LEDs for ready, wifi associated, undelivered mail loaded, and all mail on drive delivered at a one or several central email post office WiFi APs. Othernet could even send down new AP names and settings for the pocket portable Mailbox user to access.
Sending low value low capacity microSD cards under a sticker on postcards taking advantage of that media’s discount in most postal systems also gets us a laggy but cheap and sufficient bandwidth for a minimal community mail delivery return channel.
If the Mailbox auto delivery Pi-W gizmo is not used at least the Othernet base station can on command package an encrypted archive into a delivery file(deleted from the Othernet device when it receives a sent notification over Ka band) to be carried on a flash drive or card and uploaded to an Othernet portal page or sent to Othernet by anyone who couriers the file out by whatever means as an email attachment. A processing script at Othernet or another NGO could decrypt, parse, and send over the internet the email messages in the delivery bundle file, eventually some of those emails might just be sent back down to other stations on the Othernet.
In Honk Konk someone has based app on the Bridgefly API to bypass telecom lines with a bucket brigade type device-to-device Bluetooth Mesh until it can access an online WiFi node to bypass areas whithout working Internet. https://www.bridgefy.me/
Bridgefly is not free nor open source so it limits what we can do with it legally and are beholden to their whims.
There is Briar too https://briarproject.org/ but I am not sure it can route more than one jump direct from sender to receiver which is of very limited usefulness if this is true.
That said this is a model for a system where an Othernet served settlement can have their short messages delivered by anyone who brings an Othernet-uplink app equipped device to a place with Internet and connects long enough to sync her bundle of ‘mail’; answers and incoming messages will come down via satellite link.
To limit mailbox size it would probably require registering to prioritize one’s own settlement so that any settlement or city you were to drive through would stuff anyone’s device to capacity in an area of limited connectivity.