We live in the information age. Knowledge is free, but if you rely on platforms like youtube, udemy, or wikipedia to provide you with knowledge, then you are out of luck of information you need is pulled down, rotates to another platform, if there is a power outage, etc. Using streaming platforms is easy and usually cheap, but it makes you a renter instead of an owner.

With your own knowledge server you can choose what to put on it and you’ll have a hard copy if the power goes out, internet service becomes unreliable, or if you live in a country that experiences war or unrest. I didn’t consider this much until the wide spread riots a few years ago, but future threats such as these are now something Americans know can happen again.

The other thing Americans now know about is censorship. During Covid, platforms like twitter, facebook, youtube, and others shuttered open discussion. Several lawsuits reveal, the decision to do so was at the request of the Government. This is a blatant 1st amendment violation, and reveals that the Government does not respect it’s own laws or your rights. With a knowledge server, your data is censorship proof. Once you configure a server you will also have a better understanding of how to admin other apps on a server. Some of these apps can provide encrypted communication tools and enhanced privacy which are good things to know about when living under an oppressive regime.

Hardware Required

An old windows laptop or desktop is all you need with a 500gb external drive. Or, you can use a raspberry pi and a 512gb micro sd card. All the apps discussed here will work on windows, linux, or mac os.

Kiwix: Wikipedia and 70,000 free books.

Kiwix allows you to download zim files which hold a copy of a website.

Installing it and downloading a hard copy of wikipedia is as simple as a few clicks. Once you install the software there is a tab to visit that will allow you to download zip packages.

The first two I recommend are Wikipedia and Gutenberg press. The Wikipedia copy is updated every few weeks, and currently contains well over 6 million articles.

Gutenberg publishes public domain books. This is a great resource to find classic literature like Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, etc. There are over 70,000 books in the collection, and you can have them all on your server. The two collections together take up less than 200gb of space. To put this in perspective, a 256gb usb drive retails for about $14.

Kiwix offers a lot of others including medical wiki, copies of particular forums, and huge collections of ted talks. There is also content for kids, including educational videos from Khan Academy.

Calibre

Calibre is a tool for organizing your ebook collection. You might be thinking “I don’t have an ebook collection!” There are a lot of free places to get ebooks online. If you already downloaded Kiwix and the Gutenberg zim, then you can export books you know you want to read and put them into Calibre.

Calibre lets you manage the metadata like covers, descriptions, etc makes books searchable, and allows you to download them from any tablet, phone or ereader on your network.

Where Else To Find Content:

One option is Annas-Archive. I won’t link to it, but if you google it, you will find it. Annas-archive is a shadow library that directs you to publicly available books, magazines, scientific papers, etc. while a lot of content found on Annas-Archive is free, a lot of it is copyrighted and you may be violating a copyright if you choose to download material that you don’t own. Annas Archive is a safe place to find free books, but there are no warnings before downloading a shared book that is still “copyrighted”. If that bothers you, do research before downloading something from annas to make sure it fits within your ethical standards.

Another place is Archive.org, which is an online repository where anyone can upload files. While Archive.org strives to remove copyrighted material, the sheer volume of information stored on Archive.org makes it nearly impossible to do so. There are tons of free pdfs, ebooks, even whole movie collections, music, etc.

Usenet is an old version of the internet and it is still around. Unlike today’s modern internet usenet is primarily a place to find files or engage in discussions. In order to use usenet you’ll need a browser and to pay for access to the servers. Usenet has a lot of copyrighted material on it as well so the same precautions apply if that is something you care about.

Torrents are another way to find lots of data at once. Torrents are not private, and additional steps need to be taken to find out how to torrent safely. Specifically you’ll want to have a vpn and know how to prevent your torrent client from leaking your real ip address. My VPN client of choice is mullvad, my bittorrent client of choice is qbittorrent. Just like anything else torrents are just a tool. What you download with qbittorrent can be open source or free or copyrighted, so you’ll need to use your own judgement to make sure you know what you’re doing and understand the risks and ethical implications.

Torrent files and magnet links can be found on torrentgalaxy.to, yts.mx, archive.org, 1337x.to and many others around the web. I won’t link to these sites either because they contain significant amounts of copyrighted material.

Finally a word of caution. Any time you’re dealing with open, uncensored, and unregulated corners of the web there is likely to be adult content, pop-ups, and the potential for viruses. To avoid these riskd, make sure you use the appropriate search filters and a good quality ad blocker like ublock origin. Know what you’re downloading, understand the risks of downloading. If you want to understand the topic better there is a subreddit called /r/piracy and another /r/datahorder. If you search through these subreddits for info about how to torrent safely you’ll find the info. Just remember to stick to free and legal downloads like linux distros, old books and movies, etc.