I developed a platform to navigate with slow or unstable connections

Recently, I ran out of mobile data on my phone, and I was forced to browse at a significantly reduced speed. It was so slow that it was practically unusable, except for messaging apps. So, I developed a platform in the form of a search engine that allows browsing and accessing information while exchanging a negligible amount of data. This way, even with very slow or unstable connections, it became possible to search something on Google and read content. It can be useful as an emergency search engine. However, I must mention that the project is still in the proof-of-concept stage and has many bugs. Nonetheless, it has already enabled me to browse and search for information several times. I would be curious to hear your feedback, and I would be glad if it proves useful to someone other than myself! Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that the visited pages are also accessible offline.

redcalcium,

In a similar spirit, there used to be an app called SMSmart that can proxy your phone’s internet connection through a vpn tunnel over… SMS! So if you don’t have any internet connection but has unlimited sms plan, you could still access the internet, slowly.

panicodes,

Such a cool project :D

rimu,
rimu avatar

Very cool!

hyperlink2236,

Thank you!

mkeee2015,
@mkeee2015@lemm.ee avatar

Very interesting! Thank you for sharing your project!!

However, in terms of some of the benefits you mention in the "motivations", bandwidth, energy efficiency and CO2 might weak points: after all your server (backend) stays on 24/7 and it does all the heavy lifting anyway, doesn't it? So you are not really saving bandwidth/energy/CO2... (unless - of course - you cache in "time" and "space" and reuse the search results for queries of yours and of other users).

hyperlink2236,

Yes, I didn’t research this extensively… it was more of a hunch. :D Yes, certainly, I simply thought that if you minimize phone usage, it would result in a longer battery life and fewer charging cycles, which in turn would reduce CO2 emissions… but I admit it’s a bit of a stretch. :D

rimu,
rimu avatar

It's pretty complicated. Something like half the emissions / footprint of a phone or computer is in the manufacture of it so anything that means people don't need to replace their device is a win, regardless of battery life or power usage.

A lot of servers are run off renewable energy. If you check out the sustainability pages of AWS or Azure they both talk a pretty good game. Plus if you're using some flavor of serverless there isn't really a dedicated CPU core just for your app so sometimes the server side of it would be using zero energy as it's gone to sleep.

We really need to get to grips with how to measure the 'ecological weight' of software in a simple, reliable and transparent way.

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