If the internet went away indefinitely, what things would you wish you had downloaded before it happened?
For me it would be a full copy of wikipedia, an offline copy of some maps of where I live, some linux ISO's, and a lot of entertainment media.
The Time Cube so I could rebuild society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
https://web.archive.org/web/19981212033445/http://www.timecube.com/
Even better version: https://web.archive.org/web/20120224094852/http://www.timecube.com/
What the hell
Not to be confused with Times Square
What makes you think I didn't already download everything I want?
Nothing, I never said any such thing. In your case your answer to my question would be "I would not have to wish, because I already downloaded everything I want". This makes you wise.
Opera videos.
Wikipedia would be the most valuable thing if I had to pick one, I guess.
An maybe the "your jimmies are eternal video" in case I need to unrustle my jimmie ever again.
I'm adding https://www.survivorlibrary.com/ to the list
Arch wiki with arch man docs.
Today I learned I'm unintentionally preparing for the Internet apocalypse.
annas-archive.org, arxiv.org, and maybe internet archive too if possible
Honestly, I think I'm mostly set already (as I often go backpacking and there's no internet there). I have offline maps for the country I'm in and neighboring regions downloaded in OsmAnd and mapy.cz (two sources just in case), Wikipedia in Kiwix, and my custom NixOS setup as a bootable ISO on a flashdrive. I'll probably miss being able to watch science/maths edutainment on YouTube, but it's not something I'd download.
A distilled DeepSeek R1 model.
Can't believe I'm the first to say this, but... porn.
Extra RAM.
Definitely entertainment, but beyond that, Networking classes so that I can hack together a intranet for my household and the neighbourhood
Not too hard with a single server as your node and everyone being wired into it. Obviously you would have to code every website and have all required dependencies there already.
Having the whole wikipedia would get you a damn good start to getting back to civilization.
Only as good as you know about the topic, try doing a http server from just a Wikipedia page
All the images I have bookmarked on multiple devices from e621, any game I've been even possibly hesitating on pirating, all my Steam games (I don't trust Inwouldnhe able to get in and install them if I could even get into my account to begin with at that point), and downloading every single song I have saved on yt and Newpipe because I'd never see them again.
A whole slew of things.
i already download all my favs from e6 and FA lul
DownThemAll, Double Click Image Downloader, Gallery Swallower userscript.
The games you can probably get via sneakernet.
The Gutenberg Project, as well as those free online classes for things.
If you'd download the whole wikipedia be sure to download the whole commets section for each article to have a perspective on discussions on conflicting reasons for edits. Also include all the wiki media materials for all of the public domain literature, project gutenberg, entire archive.org, a good offline OS to be able to consume all of the information and you're golden
entire archive.org
How much would it cost to store like 100 petabytes for (conservatively) 40 years?
You mean electricity bills for powering the storage? I guess buying 100pb worth of storage disks would be pretty expensive enough but since it's an archive there is no need to keep it powered 24/7, just turn them on only when you need to. It's just a hypothetical situation anyway, it's a thing I wish to have access to; only an experienced sysadmin can actually maintain such great archive or its copy/backup
Let's assume you have all hard drives and in a setup with absolutely zero redundancy in case a drive fails.
We're using the Seagate Exos X24 (24TB) drive which is roughly $700 each brand new.
You'll need 4167 of them to store 100PB. Which puts you at $2,916,900 just for the drives.
Let's assume you already have the enclosures, racks, and servers for a small datacenter ready to go.
A drive can use 4-9w of power when spinning so assuming all drives are active (to ensure quick data access and data repair) that'll be roughly 27086w for all the drives at 6.5w per drive. Every month (30 days), that is 19502kWh of electricity used. 40 years is roughly 349,680 hours so that comes out to around 9,471,433kWh used.
Assuming you get some damn good electricity rates at $0.12USD per kWh, it'll cost $1,136,572 to run just the drives.
So in total, assuming you already have a datacenter with the capacity to install all the drives that runs on absolutely zero power, you'll spend roughly $4,053,472 over the course of 40 years.
A lot
So download the entire Internet, got it
Those naked pictures of your mom
Dick Valentine, is that you?
Oh please, you can find those in the yellow pages
Right after Wikipedia, it would be the Arch Linux wiki.
does that apply to the rest of Linux? I saw it in Kiwix but haven't delved into it
I did grab the ifixit zim though. pretty cool at only ~7gb
I've never used arch but their docs are so helpful. Been referencing them for years.
I’ve made sure I’m good to go, as I always thought the day might come that I can’t afford internet anyway.
I have my entire gog and itch library downloaded (if I have any steam games not on gog, I’ve pirated them if I can find it). I have my nas full of movies and tv. I listen to all my favourite music on records. Every couple of years I go through and update my rom library to make sure I have the most to to date best known roms.
Even as much as possible I keep latest version of the Linux iso I might want, and if there is an appimage of my most used programs, it’s there too.
I’m pretty much ready for my life to become leaner when it comes to internet.
I wanna be your friend lol
I already did.
Man I have never thought about it because of feeling so at ease with the digital video game stores and just downloading what I want whenever I want without keeping a physical library that would take up space. Same with books.
If the internet died tomorrow, I would have the stuff I'm playing or reading or watching downloaded but I would be out of luck for anything else until it came back. Maybe it's time to start a backup, get a big HDD or something
Youtube videos. I used to use youtube-dl exclusively, and then that stopped working, and I've gradually been sucked back into just using the website. But there's a text file with a list of URLs I've been meaning to grab for posterity... and it's getting kinda fat.
yt-dlp still works!
Perhaps instead of using youtube-dl or yt-dlp, you may enjoy some client such as freetube more, as it has a lot of the benefits of those tools, but without ads, and with sponsorblock/thumbnail correction, and other nice customizations. It also enables you to create playlists and whatnot.
You can hit a button to download directly from a video's page as well, though I think that feature needs some love from the developers (you don't get a loading bar on download).
e621 dump
Not one, but two references to e621 in this thread. And neither are from users on the furry instances. Much to think about.
okay, you caught me, my .world profile was supposed to be my non-furry lemmy account.
based
Assuming the web would go completely bust, I'd go back to a much simpler life.
archive.org, which contains wikipedia too. Checkmate!
All the Debian ISO images and all of the documentation on everything.
This way. I should have all the stable software I could wish for and the instructions on how to use them.
A car.
You wouldn't.
Honestly I'd probably just give up on technology entirely. Become a hermit carpenter or something
I'm a data hoarder so I already have done that.
Yeah same here lol. Already got Wikipedia and backup copies of all my books, as well as enough TV and movies to last a good long while. Also an entire offline copy of Project Gutenberg.
I guess a lot of music and movies from a pirate site. I'd spend more time at the library listening to my music.
All of kurzgesagt, minute physics, vsauce, Steve mould, matt parker, and veritasium. I think they're invaluable education resources and it would be useful to be able to distribute them, or just have them for my own sake.
Honestly, while fun, those videos don't provide too much value per GB - and I say that as someone who's watched almost all of them. Their main actual benefit besides entertainment is (IMHO) getting people interested in the relevant field so they study more thoroughly. They often explain simple yet dazzling concepts which get you hooked but don't provide much value on their own, and don't directly enable you to solve real-life problems. Even more involved videos like those by 3blue1brown are still edutainment at their core, as acknowledged by the author. In an apocalypse (which, let's face it, is the most likely reason the internet would indefinitely go down in a developed country) you would be much better off with engineering (mechanical, electrical, etc) literature and textbooks, maybe a couple science textbooks for good measure (I have a drawer full of the Feynman lectures in case something like this happens).
I don't disagree with the sentiment but I think having accessible, entertaining education resources would also be a huge boon. They're sure not going into depth on the topics but I imagine getting people "on the hook" could be huge, and then they can find other more educational resources from others in the community.
I do have a copy of wikipedia and I should be good on entertainment media. I guess I should expand the emergency porn stash.
Just out of curiosity, how much space/effort was that to set up? (Yes, I know I can probably google up like a bajillion resources on this exact thing, but I'm a weirdo and am attempting to bring the (non-toxic/shitty) social back to social media)
I've been considering setting myself up a little NAS server since I finally dumped Spotify and am considering doing the same with video streaming too (besides Tubi, anyway), but having one just for mp3/light video streaming seems like a bit of a waste and having local repos of useful sites might be a fun side project to help justify it to myself lol
For the Wikipedia part, it's surprisingly simple. I just used Kiwix and grabbed a copy, it's only about 100gb or so. You can also use it to get offline copies of other stuff, like Project Gutenberg.
I went with a Synology NAS (I know, the foss crowd will probably crucify me) which really keeps the setup effort to a minimum. You put in the HDDs, setup your pool/volume, install Plex (or jellyfin), upload your media and you're basically good to go.
I'm using emby for music, audiobooks, tv, and movies. You can also do picture backup/sync if you want. I am running it in a docker on my unraid server.
Latest llama version and instructions for setting it up
Probably forums I use to solve problems (stackoverflow and all the stack exchange ones), offline games, guides (for programming, sysadmin, building tables, cooking, travel and repair ones…), documentation for every software and tool I use or might use. Wikipedia is also a must, music too. I have a media server for my music but keeping it up to date with every release is hard work that I haven’t started (yet).
All the extension office university data on plants, agriculture, etc. It’s invaluable info for anyone who grows their own food and deals with bees in relation to that food growth.
Is there an archive of this kind of data anywhere? I'd love to store this. I've already got a few wikis, including Wikipedia itself, but I'd love more
It’s individual universities.
BBS software. Nerds always find a way. I guess if I have to be a sysop now…
All of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, JK I've got that shit on lock already
More pirated TV
I could honestly just re-watch most of my shows until the end of time.
I will literally never get tired of Bee and Puppycat.
This is basically my answer. I would wish my NAS was more full. I already have a pretty (imo) decent homelab with a lot of shit on it but in a “post internet” situation it would get old after a few months or maybe years depending on how fast I watched/read/listened
So tv/movies/music/books/comics and manga. Just all the media
Grab the whole world, not just where you live, it's not too much space
All of seriouseats.com
A decent chunk of that is in The Food Lab cookbook.
Nothing.
If the Internet went away, we'd have a little time before batteries were not viable even if replaceable, as distributing those batteries would get problematic.
We would have had no time to withdraw cash as cash, an important thing since banks will fall over at least enough to trigger an economic collapse.
No, we're all gonna need to learn how to fight, and live without hospitals and drugs and probably electricity.
We have bigger problems than ensuring we can look up the capital of Rwanda on this cached Wikipedia while we listen to The Cure.
If the Internet went away, we’d have a little time before batteries were not viable even if replaceable, as distributing those batteries would get problematic.
Good thing portable solar panels & lead-acid batteries exist that can easily power a couple of laptops even if their internal batteries are cooked. Solar panels last for a very long time if cared for, and lead-acid batteries can be (somewhat) useful almost indefinitely if you replace the electrolyte.
No, we’re all gonna need to learn how to fight, and live without hospitals and drugs and probably electricity.
So it would be really handy to have instructions for maintaining or even building weaponry, medical/medicinal literature to find useful herbs or other remedies, and engineering literature/textbooks/software to help us rebuild the electrical grid and then the Internet.
I'd want to pirate every drawing program I never got a chance to try, plus the fancier writing software. Gonna have a lot of time to learn both.
I've seen shockingly few movies and TV shows so maybe all the media I can get my hands on, too.
Bananaphone
Netflix.
Ableton Live
All Jetbrains products
Arcane Season 1 and 2.
Already got all my favourite games downloaded or on DVD. All my Youtube favourites and the full catalogues of some old channels would be great. No JonGrumps and no 00's meme videos make me something something.