If you knew the internet was going to be shutdown, damaged, or colossally enshittified what software would you archive for use locally and use for a neighborhood/town mesh network? Why?

As a base: The Linux kernel source, GNU software sources and compiler binaries so I can - in theory - write missing software myself. For convenience probably some stable, offline-installable, ready to use distros.
I would probably also archive sources and binaries of day-to-day software like web-browsers (I might still have an intranet to use), office tools, photo management software, audio/video players and all the codecs, etc.
I think that's a solid starting point but im sure I'm missing something important :D
- I’d also keep DNS, DHCP and routing software,detailed manuals about how IPV4 and 6 work, nginx and maybe Wordpress, lemmy, Peertube, and other federated software
  
  Good point! And Docker. Also: Encryption software
- How hard would it be to write a software to share the display of android or ipad to a pc? Like a extendable monitor/drawing table
  Current solutions are either paid monthly or laggy to all hell

My home servers time to shine
Everyone shitting on me for having a nas with ~ 200tb of storage and tape backups would finally have to eat shit because I’d have the only streaming service in town
I got enough anime to make crunchy roll blush, I have something like 3,000 series of manga and like 8,000 books in my komga server, I got non weeb shit. I archive tons of webpages and youtube channels, terabytes of music, etc.
In a situation like this I could even throw a lemmy instance on it or something. I don’t do that now but I could
Also all my anime has dubs stripped out to save space and the majority of my manga is in Japanese. 英語しか話せない奴らはクソくらえ
So I eschew your 1tb limitation. I have seen this scenario coming. I planned for it. I’m ready for it. There are others like me on lemmy in the home server page, plus if you look on the truenas, proxmox, unraid, etc forums you’ll find even more
- That's bonkers! How much physical space does your setup take? A room? A house?
  
  I recently bought a 2U nas with 12 bays. 6x20T disks at the moment, but with 12 disks it could be configured as a single 200T array.
  
  I have 90tb and it sits on a shelf 6' up in my laundry room (4x in server router/4x in external nas usb-c enclosure)
  
  20TB hard drives are around $300/each. 12 gets you there with excellent redundancy built in.
  Toss them in one of these and you have 200TB, with redundancy and room to grow.
  Not cheap to do, but the above would only run about 5-6k.
- It's not even going to this - publishers are pulling games, tv series and movies for various reasons.
  
  This is an argument I regularly make
  I have several shows in objectively better quality than streaming. We can argue about bitrate (mine definitely has more) but putting that aside, my anime has better subtitles almost always, many of my movies combine physical releases for best quality (eg video from release a with audio from release b)
  But more so than anything my library doesn’t have to deal with stupid licensing and reactionary bullshit. My library has Daria but with the original music spliced back in, not the bullshit version you get on streaming now that has all the licensed music stripped out. My library has beavis and butthead with the original music videos and all the parts they had censored. My library has the dungeons and dragons episode of community. Etc.
- I guess you're the guy OP was referring to
- https://youtu.be/bpmNgPzklmQ

I shall open a pub 🍺🍺🍺
- I'll be at the Winchester, having a nice cold pint and waiting for this all to blow over.
  
  Yeah boiii!
- Yeah I was like shiit I'll just go to the bar while the world burns
- Not an epub, unless you saved a copy of Calibre!

emulators, keep gaming alive
- I keep a raspberry pi dedicated just to have NES/SNES/etc emulators via the "retropie" distro. I have thousands of ROMs that I can plug into any TV with HDMI and SNES/NES USB controllers for it. $100 for a full raspi kit to have full access to anything just by copying some files over to a microsd card. Can't remember controller cost but that's kind of a given requirement.

Besides the basics (operating systems, compilers, office, CAD, database, etc software):
A copy of open street map together with the linked Wikipedia articles, along with the software to view and edit them. I know you said no wikipedia, (since that's pretty much a given), but this is basically the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
A copy of Godot's editor so people can still make games.
As many games as I could fit in the remaining space, concentrating on the ones that give you the most bang for your buck in terms of space.
- what are you looking at in terms of bang for buck games?
  just hours per MB so all retro?
  
  Retro is a good starting point. You can store just about every NES game ever released in less than a GB, and the SNES isn't that much bigger. Once you get into the 3D era you might have to be a little more selective, but you could still fit a lot of early 3D games in there.
  Another way to economize space would be video game mods. Since many mods reuse the same models and textures to make a new game, you could multiply the amount of content you get per MB that way. And there are a ton of Half Life 1 mods, Thief mods, and Doom WADs out there. Gmod can run over LAN, and there's an absolute ton of maps and game modes for that.
  Finally, there are some more modern games that are remarkably small. Animal Well is only 35 MB. Gloomwood is only 2.07 GB, comparable to the size of its inspiration Thief (1998), though Gloomwood is unfinished at the moment and will probably be bigger once it's out of early access. Shadows of Doubt is 1.31 GB. Lethal Company weighs in at 1.07 GB and can apparently be made to work over LAN. ADACA at 2.44 GB is actually smaller than its inspirations Half Life 2 and STALKER, probably by dint of having only vertex colors and no textures.
  
  Honestly, its a great way to go. I have a handheld for emulation. 1tb micro SD has a lot of games on it. Even if you're just looking at PS1/N64 to PS2/GameCube era, you can get enough games to last you years and it won't cost much.

I have started to do this and I'm using Docker to host Kiwix. I'm currently using it to provide offline versions of Wikipedia, medical guides and tutorials for various programming languages. My plan is to put essential apps and information on an RPi and provide a broadcast hotspot where anyone can access the info.
I also live on top of a hill, so I'm saving up to put together a solar powered Meshtastic repeater that I can mount to my aerial pole.

Maps would be the most valuable data.
- Printed maps exist already though
- How do we get this locally
  
  openstreetmaps I think, and GPS.

My first thought was debian installer plus everything on a debian mirror. You could get "all" plus "amd64" in 998gb.
However, the majority of that wouldn't be very useful. While a bunch of the stuff on the selfhosted awesome list certainly would be.
The problem is, because this hypothetical scenario is so broad, IDK which things would actually be appropriate.
- Hey thanks for that second link. I didn’t know about that project and it’s amazing!
  
  Yeah it is very useful, just be aware that it's not an exhaustive list and not necessarily the most awesome.
  It's a good starting point but it's always a good idea to check alternativeto.net
  Another good resource is linuxserver.io they provide docker containers but rather than just having everything they tend to only have the best of whatever thing.
  
  awesome lists in general are a great thing to search for in a lot of situations
  another example: https://github.com/dbeley/awesome-lemmy

Probably guides on how to make a mesh-net and the appropriate hardware to do so. No idea how that's done.
- There you go https://mander.xyz/c/meshtastic

Keeping the electricity on long enough to enjoy games or movies is gonna be difficult if you rely on the grid right now.
So maybe archive the electronics stack exchange, and solar/battery installation guides so you can steal it if the neighbors roof.
- If internet shuts down you'll have trouble keeping your life long enough to enjoy this.
  I know it's a fun hypothetical but without internet wed be falling into an immediate collapse which we might recover from but many wouldn't make it.
  
  I don’t think you’re supposed to tease out this scenario too far. It’s a pretty focused question.

Fire Zeal and Fetch every API documentation listed there
Pull latest deepseek models
Clone entire debian current repo
Clone Firefox, Linux and the gnu coreutils
Clone Litecoin and Litewallet
Download the most recent dump of Wikipedia
Download all the maps and data available today in OSM
That should do for me

FreeBSD ports with distfiles for things really necessary, with dependencies. I guess that would fit in 1TB and leave some for ebooks and music.
Also software RAID is not Frankensteiny at all, neither are storage clusters of Ceph or alternatives.
What those things necessary would encompass, I don't know. I suppose similar to Slackware full installation.
It would all make little sense without the Internet. You'd suddenly find that a year 1995 machine, one year older than me, and a few friendly BBSes are not as unrealistically small as they seem now.

Nothing, I would just to plant some potatoes instead or something
- FYI it can take up to 3 years to bring enough nutrients and biodiversity to a patch of land to get really decent harvests, so if you haven't started already now is the time to. Good luck, and may your potato harvests be bountiful!

Open source collaboration will be difficult on mesh, so my contribution would be jailbreaks and cracked versions of softwares. My local government will need it since all their systems run on licensed software 🥲
I'd also get my hands on a bunch of iphone and android jailbreaks, because phone OSes might just stop working in 9 months if they're left unmodified.

Lots of good things already mentioned. So I'll say Shareboxx

Wikipedia

Probably just clone and host a pornhub
- Pornhub, but it's just your cul-de-sac

Though I’m sure that person exists here on Lemmy somewhere :D
I feel seen!
In all honesty, I've been doing something somewhat similar for the last 2 decades or so. Originally I was building my archives because I was often away from internet access. Now, though, it's just become habit.
I started with basic first aid and medical texts and whatever other books and reference texts I found interesting. To that I also archive proprietary software and the source code and releases for the open source software I find useful. Add to that ISOs of the distributions I tend to use and I'm at roughly 3TB. I could probably cut that to 2TB if I remove the older Ubuntu and NixOS releases. I'm over 30TB if you include CD and DVD rips.
About the only thing I am missing from my current archives would be a clone of the Ubuntu and NixOS repositories for all of the "glue" dependencies that no one ever thinks of. After that you would just need the hardware to build out the network.

To start, I’d download nixpkgs. That would cover pretty much anything I could want.

Raspberry pi os , it can also be run on non raspberry pis*. all the recommended packages in its menu (libre office?) that should get you a nice os.
Some torrenting software to ensure you can help share it around.
I recently heard of something called a 'Pirate box' which is a WiFi router without a password and storage attached for people to upload and download stuff to / from .
I wouldn't do it myself, but if it was a country town, it could be something similar to a virtual notice board in the pub.
Might as well get Debian and Ubuntu too.

I'd download my entire GOG library of games. The offline installer versions they offer without GOG Galaxy client.

As much as I dislike Microsoft, the world runs on Excel, so it's got to be near the top of the list.
For myself.. calibre and my ebook collection and all the games I can manage.

All Debian and its packages. Probably a bunch of Meshtastic stuff. And a copy of Wikipedia.

My first move would be to download the whole Debian software repo

I need 800 GiB to host a Gentoo distfile mirror. This is what I would do.

I always see a lot of great and diverse solutions for maintaining information and even being self sufficient in the face of some sort of societal collapse and loss of infrastructure. I never see plans mentioned for what to do afterwards. The point being, there seems to be an assumption of either permanence to things like storage and alternative energy sources, or perhaps an implied having to just last a decade or so and things will be rebuilt.
So hypothetical, something happens and things go away, but someone in your community has set up a center of preservation of knowledge that can be tapped into through a mesh network, and everyone has a minimal power setup to use some things to do this and other electronic based work. Now what? Is asking this question too vague since there can be so many scenarios possible and we just have to figure it out from there?
TL;DR - what happens to a post-collapse tech center in the long run since we see all the time that there are limits to even the best storage media and parts wear out even in non-moving solar panels. Mass replacements and salvage are a given, but even that has limits and problems.

I'd be fucked because I work on and use OSS multiple times a day, and have no idea what a distributed maven central looks like

I'd just go back to living without it.

TrashRobot. So i can crate a simple local wireless network and share data with people

I'd raid a Google data center and work on rebuilding the Internet with whatever remains of their infrastructure. Wait is this us talking about our apocalypse plans or...?
- If apocalypse is another word for thursday...

Jellyfin collection and lots of cracked games.

The most up-to-date information I can get on self hosting virtually anything, along with all major Linux distro’s and drivers I may need.
Yeah there will come a day where machines can’t support it, but I would then try to spend my time taking care of whatever I have on hand and future proofing as best I can, crossing my fingers and hoping that in 10 to 15 years there will be something else I can do