PeARS-orchard VS Mumble

> We now have a distributed crawler that runs on our volunteers' machines! If you have Firefox you can help out by installing our extension.

This is a very interesting idea that other search engines have tried before. Actually, the Brave search engine is built over Cliqz[6] that implemented this same idea but *without* the user's consent.

Copy pasting from an old comment I made about this "human web" crawler idea:

Both PeARS[1] and Cliqz[2] tried to do that. Both got direct support from Mozilla[3][4] but it looks like neither really kicked off.

PeARS was meant to be installed voluntarily by users who would then choose to share their indexes only to those they personally trusted, so the idea is very privacy conscious but also very hard to scale.

Cliqz, on the other hand, apparently tried to work around that issue by having their add-on bundled by default in some Firefox installations[5] which was obviously very controversial because of its privacy and user consent implications.

I still think the idea has potential, though, even if it's in a more limited scope.

[1] https://github.com/PeARSearch/PeARS-orchard

[2] https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/human-web

[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/06/22/mozilla-gives-3...

[4] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-s...

[5] https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/brave_buys_a_search_e...

I think Sonobus is overkill. I suggest you look at a couple of relatively old-school gamer voice chat tools - Mumble or Teamspeak. Mumble is open-source and the connection is always encrypted, Teamspeak is commercial but the free tier should be fine for you - but you have to make sure to manually turn encryption on yourself. It has been a long time since I used either, so I don't know which is easier. Both of them require you to run their matching server software.

Mumble's latency is unbeatable imo, it's basically their main focus and shows.

The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus. Issue open since 2016: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/2560

If you drop out for a minute you won't have access to anything that was posted in chat, which makes it useless for anything other than voice only comms, that might suit some business purposes but I've always needed to post links or screenshots in chat during meetings.

There's any number of alternative chat applications available, like Element, Mumble, Teamspeak etc.

Mumble?

I think Mumble might fit what you're looking for. It's been a very long time since I've used it, but it seems to still exist: https://www.mumble.info/ - I've used previously for exactly what you're describing, events with lots of crew dispersed around and no budget for radios. I had it installed on an AP running OpenWRT so it was just a case of plugging that in and getting people to install the app and connect to it.

Along with the options already mentioned, if you're not into TeamSpeak, there is an open source alternative called Mumble which operates in the same manner. No internet required, and is supported on multiple platforms.