Page 1 of 1

Kiwix: A cool offline internet viewer

Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2026 10:26 am
by celes
Someone shared with me today and I thought it was to cool not to share it myself :blobcatrss:

There's this project called kiwix. Their goal is to provide access to knowledge when there's no internet, so they provide access to lots of trusted knowledge sources: There's books, talks, wikipedia and your favorite software's documentation is probably there too :hammyeyes:

The first place to check is the library where you can search through the archives. If you click the cards you can open the libraries and browse through the website archives. They even have a search feature that isn't half bad.

It took me a while to find out how to read these archives locally, but here's a good comprehensive list. It seems they have plenty of options, from a simple offline app you can run locally to a little frontend you can self-host that uses the same interface as the library I shared above.

I'm gonna be putting one of these in my cluster to toy with it!

Re: Kiwix: A cool offline internet viewer

Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2026 9:33 pm
by Sugui
That's a very interesting project. Now that the web is at risk, it's important to help preserving it! Or even for events like internet blackouts, like when some major infrastructure provider is down, it's always nice to have a local copy of those websites!

I'm also thinking about piracy now, non-centrally distributed information is one of the best and durable ways to preserve shows, music, software, books from be lost forever... Think about the old shows that streaming services stopped to host u_u

So, I see you have received the call of Hari Seldon! :nkoPat:

Re: Kiwix: A cool offline internet viewer

Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2026 9:56 am
by celes
Sugui wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2026 9:33 pm So, I see you have received the call of Hari Seldon!
Indeed! We'd all do well to start preserving knowledge. I don't think any sort of catastrophic events are necessary for preservation stuff to come in handy. You never know when some asshole is gonna decide to block a whole country's internet to protect a bunch of fragile-ego'd clowns and their right to chase after a ball.