> This is my plea to the HN community: stop treating "offline-first" as a niche feature and start treating it as a human right. We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely. We need isolated documentation tools and local-first databases that can sync via Bluetooth or physical handoffs.

I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of the problems in Iran, but switching to a world where tools are design first for syncing via Bluetooth and offline methods just isn’t going to make a better world for all of us.

You need specialized tools for specialized situations. Trying to get the whole world to pay the overhead of mesh networks and Bluetooth handoffs and all of the design choices that go along with it would be a mistake.

The software world is not monolithic. Pleas for everyone to stop building for the way the world works and start building for highly unusual and specific use cases isn’t reasonable.

Build specialized tools for specialized circumstances. They will always serve the purpose far better than if you try to get everyone to build their general purpose tools around extremely rare circumstances.

> We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely.

Let's do a thought experiment: assume they're here and that we are talking about a dictatorship. What's next?

If it's something like Meshtastic — it requires standalone hardware. These devices will be outlawed. The entire country will stop importing them, confiscating these devices from whoever uses them, probably jailing people who own them.

Alright, then what if it's something like BitChat instead — you only need your phone. If it gets traction, police will stop you and force you to unlock your phone. They do this already in Russia.

It's not a technical problem and can't be solved like one.

I disagree. Build for your target audience and your targeted application. We don't need for every vehicle to be off-road-capable when you're expecting to deliver cargo on paved roads. We can do that, but it will make things more complex and more expensive.

I'm not saying that nobody should ever consider "the state cuts off the internet" as a criteria when deciding what to do, but making that a foundational requirement is like starting out with "handle google-scale" as a requirement when you have zero reason to believe you will.

There are plenty of good reasons for local first apps, but "build for darkness" is pretty far down the list for me.

Shameless plug: start with https://comaps.app/ . Recently I helped a woman find an address because she told me there's some problem with her internet connection.

I think having an offline map of at least the region you live in can come in handy. In fact, I carry an old phone with impressive battery life (Samsung Galaxy A10) and offline maps installed on it so I don't get lost.

> As builders, we are being out-engineered.

The funny part of engineers is that they always think that, at some point, they will reach perfect engineering.

The best engineering already exists and you do not need to do a thing. Code will not save you from the shtstorm that is coming.

How would you communicate using an offline app?

The difference is that IR didn’t use Artesh (it’s military) to suppress the protests. They bused in its proxy militias from Iraq, who doesn’t care much who to shoot.

Isn't HRANA funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a well-known CIA front?

> The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health.

Then why does the article say that they couldn't independently verify the number and that the only source is a German-Iranian eye doctor?

Main difference is that a good chunk do the crackdown was done by bringing in katib hezbollah from surrounding countries.

>The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health.

It comes, allegedly, from people from that ministry who were talking to TIME.

I would imagine their contact was probably mediated by the state department - the same people currently gearing up for an Iraq-style invasion.

Later on TIME adds:

>TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.

Which is not altogether unsurprising. TIME wasnt exactly the most careful magazine when it came to verifying state department supplied intelligence about WMDs back in 2003.

There's limited coverage of all global conflicts, certainly in American media, but quite likely in other Western media.

> What explains the silence from activists outside Iran on this particular issue?

What explains the silence from the media on all other conflicts. It's certainly not because lives are not being destroyed in Sudan [1] and Myanmar [2].

1. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/01/1166738

2. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1166004

Lack of shock images, and lack of personnel for humanitarian orgs. Protests and killings are happening outside of the locations MSF is implanted, and even if we have stories from doctors prevented from helping shot protesters, we don't have videos (and in the last few years and especially the last two weeks, doctors finally understood no one cared if they were prevented to help, since it was acceptable in France and even in the US).

The only NGO looking for Iran exclusively is Iran Human Right (https://iranhr.net/en/) and depend on the UNHRC, which is not particularly media trained and not good at reacting (also, they lost US funding less than a year ago and are reorganizing as we speak).

In the end, it will be like Yemen or Sudan all over again: media hear of the massacre late, send journalists, journalists get refused, they send journalists to neighboring countries and infiltrate with local guide help, some journalist dies, and three month after the beginning of the trouble we will get images and information.

Probably the activists are hesitant because the US is rearing to start a war with Iran (that will certainly kill way more civilians) and they don’t want to contribute to that decision.

In America at least, we saw protests against some of the things Israel did in Gaza because the US government is supporting Israel. Since the US is not a supporter of Iran, and in fact has been strong adversary for decades, there is less reason to protest here. Plus, we’ve got some serious problems of our own that are keeping us occupied at the moment

There's no activism because everybody agrees it's terrible. If your govt is already cutting out Iran and sanctioning them, there's no need to demand action.

This is very different from Israel, where our govts are actively supporting a genocide. That requires activism to change course.

Why would people demonstrate if everyone is aligned?

Because Persians are fighting islam (they're burning down mosques).

and the islamic regime was a sponsor of previous pro-palestine movements.

leftists don't find this an appealing mix. they'd rather blame Israel for everything, but here we see Iranians siding with the Israelis because they've seen what islam does to their country.

Nobody in the west actually cares about injustice. They just pretend to care when it's politically convenient.

Unfortunately, ABC and NBC haven't found a way to blame Trump for what's happening in Iran. Highlighting the atrocities perpetuated in the name of Islam is more likely to help Trump than hurt him, so this story must be minimized. It's just good, smart politics.

Islam and Neoliberal wests are the strangest bedfellows. Thankfully people like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and many others pointed the oddities long before many others made it us vs them political. Palestinian cause is used to drown any other legitimate concerns about ideology

People are not being told to be outraged about it via whatever social media platform.

Religion and virtue signaling.

As another comment said, they shouldn't be ignored, but they also should be taken with a massive grain of salt.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-casualty-counts-us-funde...

They shouldn't be ignored, but they also should be taken with a massive grain of salt. This reporting has all the hallmarks of the US State Department manufacturing consent for yet another war.

After WMDs i honestly thought america learned to be a bit more skeptical of poorly sourced "pretext for war" stories which emerge in the context of a military build up.

E.g. like reading the sentence:

>TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.

And going "hmmm".

Ukraine was historically more or less a free-for-all as far as front-line cinema is concerned.

I have to imagine the situation in Iran is more difficult for a few reasons:

1. Gen AI is much better today than it was in 2022. So, both sides can generate much more realistic fakes.

2. There was an article here on HN about Iran's internet slowly coming back on a whitelist basis. We're probably getting more pro-Government videos now than we were at the beginning of the current events.

3. Further crackdown on Starlink minimizes authentic leaks (I only heard about this and have no way to confirm how impactful this really is)

I'll add my own anecdotal agreement with your suspicion though - the footage coming out of Iran has been, for me, more difficult than other conflicts to piece together into a cohesive story. Western countries are claiming 30k+ dead, and while I don't necessarily reject the claim, the situation on the ground is still very blurry to me.

Because the internet is out so it’s extremely difficult to get the footage out.

There is footage slowly trickling out.

I don't like promoting gore websites but in watchpeopledie and search Iran you can count yourself at least hundreds of body from all the videos, often in a single location, usually the aftermath.

Who's pg?

I hope you're right.

is isnt? there's a thread here that currently has 789 comments that isn't killed, and the previous two ICE deaths had comment threads even longer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46745047

What's the difference? they protested the government, got shot at. Then after a few month of getting killed while protesting, they chose to retaliate. Is it when the protesters retaliate that you call a protest an uprising?

Aerial bombardments typically target areas with ~0.01 people/square meter, and those people are often in hardened shelters. A protest may have 1–4 people/square meter out in the open. Attacks targeting the latter cause orders of magnitude more casualties for the same amount of firepower.

And the crowd itself can be deadly if it gets too dense, due to panic or otherwise. For example, there have been at least two crowd collapse events with >1000 deaths in the Mecca pilgrimage.

first: it's not in one day, it is over three weeks. Second, the 25000 is an extrapolation. Basically the Iran Islamic republic has a tendency to admit to 10-15% of the death toll, and they admit 3000 death.

It is a fair question.

I think it's just a stupid comparison. Aerial bombing campaign on a single city 80 years ago vs government coming down on protesters distributed in over 100 cities was the best reference you could find to doubt these numbers?

The Gaza numbers are confirmed deaths, with bodies and identities and all, it's not counting people they can't identify or who are missing and presumed dead (buried under rubble and the like). The confirmed death tolls are considered to be a vast undercount of actual total deaths. This 30k number is much less rigorous and we have no way to know it's accuracy.

It started like that though. It was a protest, then government military start killing people, again, and again, and once deadly violence is on the board, protester takes arms and shoot too. Then bystanders get killed, protesters get killed, some government military police get killed, and here if the government still has a bit of morality left, you get Euromaidan. If its the military, you get what happened in Nepal.

However, if none of that happen, you have a civil war.

Lets not all change our word use because it doesn't align with your narrow definition of protest.