In the early 2000s, enthusiastic networkers began to suspect something and decided that they needed a new, anonymous, and preferably uncontrolled internet. This gave rise to a whole movement of people trying to imagine how this could be achieved in reality with projects of varying degrees of wildness.

Often, they were more like art objects than something that actually worked. But, as with any idea, there was something in it that contained a very interesting rational grain.

Special thanks to TG channel NetSurvivalist for information provided!

In 2025, the mainstream internet feels more like a shopping mall with armed guards than the open frontier it once was. Governments throttle traffic during protests, corporations harvest every click, and entire countries get switched off when inconvenient truths start trending. Against that backdrop, a loose family of offline-first, decentralized, and deliberately disconnected networks has quietly refused to die.

Some are fifteen years old, some are purely physical, and one literally rides the subway. They go by names like PirateBox, Dead Drops, Secure Scuttlebutt, and Netless. They are not replacements for the global internet; they are escape pods.

Netless (sometimes stylized lowercase) is barely documented because it is designed to be invisible. The concept is brutally elegant: encrypt files, put them on cheap USB sticks or SD cards, and hand them to strangers on public transport with a small note: “Plug this into any computer running Netless and pass it on.”

Buses, trams, and trains become the routers. Data hops city-wide via commuters. It is friend-to-friend, delay-tolerant, and completely off the surveillance grid. It is the digital equivalent of samizdat on the Moscow metro in the 1970s, except now with PGP and deniable encryption.

The principle of its operation was that the main means of data transport was the city transport network. Data transmission was to be carried out via nodes — small devices (the prototype used the popular TP-LINK 3023 mini routers) that constantly pinged the airwaves in search of similar devices.

When a similar device appeared nearby, data synchronization took place, which could then be accessed by connecting to the node itself via WiFi from any tablet, smartphone, or laptop. And this is where public transport came in — it constantly moves along specific routes, periodically intersecting, thus providing an opportunity for regular synchronization.

If you like this idea and want to play around with it, you can use the materials provided by the author and his like-minded colleagues (including firmware), who brought this project to its third version.

Imagine a Raspberry Pi in a lunchbox (or a 3D-printed skull, people get creative) broadcasting its own Wi-Fi network with no internet uplink. Anyone within 100 meters can connect, upload, download, chat, and disappear without ever leaving a trace.

No accounts, no logs, no cloud. Just a local, anonymous file-sharing hotspot you can carry in your pocket. Born in 2011 out of art-school rebellion and free-culture idealism by David Darts, PirateBox was originally conceived as a way to share music and movies outside copyright enforcement. Today, it is used by activists in blackout zones, teachers in rural schools, musicians at festivals, and disaster response teams when cell towers are down. A solar-powered PirateBox can run for days on a car battery and turn any refugee camp, protest square, or underground rave into its own miniature internet.

In 2010, the Berlin artist Aram Bartholl started embedding USB sticks into public walls in New York City. The rule was simple: cement the drive in flush, leave it empty except for a readme.txt, publish the GPS coordinates, and walk away.

Within months, strangers were adding their own drops in São Paulo, Tehran, Moscow, and Antarctica. At its peak, there were over 3,000 registered Dead Drops worldwide. Plug in a laptop, drop whatever you want (manifestos, banned books, mixtapes, leaked documents), unplug, leave. The next person does the same.

No servers, no IP addresses, no metadata. Just concrete and trust. In 2025 update: people now coat the drives in epoxy, add weatherproof caps, or hide them inside fake rocks. Some drops have been alive for 15 years, quietly fermenting into digital time capsules.

The “Pirate Box” was a logical continuation of a conceptual art project called “DeadDrop.” The essence and extravagant implementation of this project was that ordinary USB flash drives were embedded in walls throughout the city with their connectors facing outward, inviting people to connect their computers to them.

Well, you get the idea — how many people would want to connect to 220V outlets? Conceptually gathering the adoration of fighters for privacy and freedom of information, the idea would have faded away if, in 2011, one of the authors of the original DeadDrop, David Darts, and the engineer who joined him, Matthias Strubel, had not created the “Pirate Box.”

The idea was as simple as that flash drive in the wall — people connect to a Wi-Fi access point, but instead of getting the usual internet access, they end up in a file storage with a built-in HTML chat. Well, what else does a person need to be happy? Initially, it was all done using the same TP-Link 2030 (you can find the firmware here).

From 2011 to 2018, the guys gathered rave reviews from the technical and tech-related press, for some reason emphasizing anonymity (well, in the rush of network romance, they forgot that in order to identify all users, you simply had to be physically within the range of the access point). The project lasted until 2018 and version 1.1.4, which added the functionality of creating your own mesh infrastructure.

During its existence, Pirate Box has received numerous forks, but unfortunately, it never became popular. However, the idea of a small local internet has a lot of potential… And in fact, it became the conceptual basis for developments related to the rapid deployment of emergency communication systems. But that’s a completely different story.

Jcorp Nomad is an open-source offline media server designed for travel, remote work, education, camping, and other purposes. It runs on ESP32-S3, creates a local Wi-Fi access point, and provides access to media content through a browser interface. Multiple users can simultaneously access different media streams without an Internet connection.

Although the author based his design on the Waveshare module, which is not particularly common in our country, I see no obstacles to assembling the software part for the Lilygo modules that are popular here. Although the project is already in its second revision, it still looks unfinished. And the author’s page has a fairly extensive plan for developing the functionality.

Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is the strangest and most successful of the bunch. It is a complete social network that works entirely peer-to-peer and mostly offline. You create an identity (a cryptographic keypair), you post messages to your own append-only log, and whenever your phone or laptop meets another SSB node (via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or even a USB stick), the logs “gossip” with each other and sync what’s missing.

There are no central servers to shut down, no feeds algorithmically boosting outrage, no ads. You only see posts from people you follow and people they follow (plus a few hops further if you want). It works on sailboats in the Pacific, in Cuban mesh networks, in Sudanese blackout zones, and in New Zealand bush communes. Apps like Manyverse and Planetary make it feel almost like a normal social feed, except you own everything and nobody can ban you.

History does not reveal whether Dominic Tarr, the creator of Secure Scuttlebutt, recalled the good old FIDO network when creating his brainchild, but in my opinion, this is how it should look in our time.

The idea for Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB for short) came to Tarr for a very prosaic reason: at the time, Dominic was living on his own sailboat off the coast of New Zealand, constantly going out to sea. Starlink had not yet been invented, satellite internet was prohibitively expensive, and he wanted to stay in touch with friends and relatives. And then, memories of his youth came to mind — peer-to-peer networks, where each user stored their own copy of their cozy “internet” on their own computer.

• You install one of the applications that support the SSB protocol on your computer or smartphone and allocate space for it to store the log (this is where your entire network will live). Next, you will automatically receive an identification key, which will be used to identify you on the network.

• Every time your device is on a local network, the app will send UDP packets to find other SSB users. If it finds a user who is subscribed to you (and you are subscribed to them), it will synchronize all the information they have posted, saving it to your device and creating a copy at the same time. Or, if you haven’t done so, it will indicate the presence of a fellow user with similar interests.

• If there are no other peer-to-peer Internet enthusiasts in your networks, you can use the Pubs system, through which you can subscribe to any SSB user regardless of their location relative to you.

• This network has one drawback: one device equals one key, which means one account.

• Since its creation, there has been a proliferation of clients for the SSB protocol, as well as networks based on it. The SSB protocol itself has become the main protocol of the decentralized Internet.

1. When the government cuts the internet, these still work. Egypt 2011, Iran 2019, Myanmar 2021, Sudan 2023 — every major blackout has seen PirateBoxes and SSB nodes pop up within hours.

2. When you don’t want Meta, TikTok, or a three-letter agency reading your group chat, these give you actual privacy, not the marketing version.

3. When cell towers are down after a hurricane or earthquake, a handful of solar PirateBoxes or LoRa-equipped SSB nodes can coordinate rescue efforts better than any official channel.

4. When you’re sick of infinite scroll and dopamine farming, these networks are slow, human-scale, and finite — and that turns out to feel really good.

5. Because sometimes you just want to share a folder of memes at a festival without giving your soul to a corporation.

Here are some ideas that could actually be built today with off-the-shelf parts:

1. LoRaMesh Villages:
   Cheap LoRa transceivers ($15–30) + solar panels + ESP32 boards deployed on rooftops or lamp posts. 10–30 km range per hop, text + small files only, extremely low power. A village or small town could be fully meshed for under $1,000. Add an encrypted SSB on top, and you have a censorship-resistant regional gossip network that runs for years on a couple of car batteries.

2. BeaconDrop:
   Combine Dead Drops with Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. Small solar beacons hidden in public spaces continuously broadcast an SSID and a public key. Phones running a BeaconDrop app automatically detect them, exchange encrypted bundles via Bluetooth, and carry the data away. No need to physically plug anything in; the network moves with people’s pockets.

3. CourierFleet:
   Partner with bicycle couriers, delivery drivers, or even garbage trucks. Equip them with cheap Android phones or Raspberry Pis running delay-tolerant bundles (like the Serval Project or Briar’s transport layer). Packages and data ride the same routes. In a city with 500 couriers you suddenly have a high-bandwidth, high-latency mesh that authorities can’t easily shut down because it’s literally the logistics layer of capitalism.

4. Acoustic Mesh:
   Use ultrasonic audio (18–22 kHz, inaudible to most adults) to transmit data between laptops and phones in the same room or on the same bus. Extremely low bitrate, but perfect for keys, short messages, or SSB sync when Wi-Fi/Bluetooth is being jammed. Bonus: dogs hate you.

5. SkyDrop Network:
   Weather balloons or high-altitude drones carrying lightweight SSB “pub” nodes that drift at 20–30 km altitude for days, relaying messages across hundreds of kilometers via LoRa. Launch one from the edge of an internet blackout zone and suddenly the entire region is back online — slowly, but online on its own terms.

These networks will never give you 4K Netflix. That’s the point. They trade speed and convenience for independence and resilience. And in 2025 that trade is starting to look like the only sane one left. The beautiful thing is you don’t have to choose between the global internet and going offline.

You can live in both worlds. Keep your corporate accounts for cat videos, and keep a PirateBox in your backpack, a Dead Drop key on your keyring, and an SSB identity on your phone for when the mall finally locks the doors. The escape pods are already here. They’re just waiting for the rest of us to notice.

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