- mBBS: The internet is not as safe as we once thought it was. mBBS was/is an attempt to fix that. It is a local wifi network, that does not connect back to the larger internet. Folks could share things locally, peer-to-peer, or publish them to the box (provided there was enough storage.) We experimented with various methods of moving content between various mBBS instances, in an attempt to make something federated.
Long Range Wifi worked, as did various FTP-based psudo-sneakernets. We ran a node at Analog Revolution for nearly a year, and enjoyed it a great deal.
This one was killed by the technical complexity of long range (5+ mile) wireless communication, and the shuttering of the store. It's at the top of my list for projects to revive.
-Then: (Suspended, but I'm sad about it)
- Now: Still suspended, and I'm still sad about it. I've done a lot more work with offline messaging, with intranets and sneakernets and digital publishing without the web, and I've written about and talked about these topics a lot.
If I ever have six months with nothing else to do but tinker, I might come up with something that might do some good, but I'm not likely to.