← Resilience

Decentralized Community Network

seedling updated

A layered community network designed for resilience during ISP outages, infrastructure failures, and political unrest. Layers are ordered from least to most sophisticated, with graceful degradation: mesh → LoRa → sneaker-net → in-person. All layers operate independently without internet. This network raises the cost of surveillance and interference but is not a guarantee of safety — operational security and community trust remain critical.

Layer 1 — Air-Gapped / Physical

No radio emissions, no IP traffic. Nearly undetectable.

Connectivity

  • USB sneaker-net: physically carry drives between nodes to sync data and software
  • Direct P2P ethernet: two laptops connected with a crossover cable for local file transfer or git sync at meetups
  • In-person meetups: coordinate, train operators, distribute updates out-of-band

Offline Resources

  • First aid and medical references
  • Survival and field guides
  • Emergency protocols and local contact trees
  • Offline maps (printable)
  • Legal rights documentation (know-your-rights, local emergency law)
  • Cached Wikipedia (Kiwix)

Security

  • Private keys stored physically, never networked
  • Public key fingerprints exchanged in person to verify identity before trusting digital keys

Layer 2 — Low-Power Radio (LoRa / Meshtastic)

Low bandwidth, long range, difficult to trace to a fixed location.

  • Emergency messaging and alerts across the community
  • Off-grid capable with small solar + battery
  • Fallback when mesh WiFi is unavailable or unsafe to operate

Layer 3 — Mesh WiFi

Visible RF infrastructure but locally controlled end-to-end.

Infrastructure

  • Point-to-point 5 GHz directional links
  • Redundant backbone, no single points of failure
  • Ring topology backbone (RSTP), star topology edge nodes
  • WPA3 on all WiFi nodes; VPN encryption tunnels
  • Battery backup on backbone nodes; solar charging capable

Security

  • GPG-signed manifests with SHA-256 checksums for all distributed binaries (keys managed in Layer 1)
  • Signed firmware updates; no cloud dependency for any critical function

Local Services

  • DNS (.local), NAS/file storage, messaging and bulletin board
  • NTP, local Git server, emergency alert broadcast
  • Replication across multiple nodes; automatic failover on node failure

Layer 4 — Public Internet

Used when available to sync cached content down to lower layers.

  • Pull software updates, package mirrors, and documentation to mesh nodes
  • Sync offline reference content
  • Pull LLM model updates
  • Push git commits and cloud backups while accessible

Offline Development Stack

Hosted on mesh nodes (Layer 3), but software and data can be carried via sneaker-net (Layer 1) when the mesh is down.

  • Cached web servers, pre-built runtimes (Node, Python, Go, Rust)
  • Offline package mirrors (npm, pip, cargo) and documentation mirrors
  • Common databases (PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis) and build tools
  • Local LLM inference with cached models for offline AI assistance

Community & Governance

Spans all layers — operators must know how to work at each level.

  • Trained volunteer node operators
  • Governance body, funding mechanism (dues/sponsorship), operator training
  • Runbooks for common failures and maintenance

Limitations

This network does not support:

  • Streaming or bandwidth-heavy external content
  • Cloud service access (unless pre-cached)
  • Complete independence from the global backbone

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