Many student dormitories (at least used to when the internet was still very slow) have such hyper-local intranets for sharing movies and other stuff. A local IRC server with p2p file-sharing was also common. Local network game-servers with games like Minetest might also be popular.

I heartily approve, without much help to offer. Points of thought...

-Calibre web server good, mirror Annas Archive best, practically somehow getting everyone's downloaded books into a community Calibre would rock.

• You're going to need a bigger NAS (Jaws pun, but seriously, this will be at least / more important than your server, redundancy is king)
• Probably something lighter / easier too maintain than Nextcloud for simple filesharing, Seafile perhaps?
• Honestly, this is the sort of initiative that could drive local Mesh adoption.
• What security are you using, most govs/corps don't like private internets, how vulnerable are you to CSAM etc.

I'm aware of a fair amount of local sneaker net approaches (HDD swapping etc), which mostly avoids the security issues. I too would love to hear about successful use cases.

Just wanted to say I really like this idea, especially as mixed with local mesh networks. I agree with the point about storage, and mostly I'm just really looking forward to reading about some of these services, and seeing what this could look like in the future.

Good luck!

Back in college, we had this huge LAN spanning hundreds of computers, and we had a central instance of a search engine that crawled all the Samba and FTP shares, so anyone could just look up whatever media or software they were looking for, and if the particular computer was online at the time (people do turn off their PCs sometimes, go figure :) ), download it.

Of course, I'm not sure if having unprotected SMB/FTP shares is something fitting into your idea of a local intranet, but it's an option. The guys maintaining the crawler even put the code online, and it should still mostly work: https://github.com/fslts/lase

Sounds good. Maybe some sort of forum system, like https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown (activitypub-based) or https://karrot.world or even an instance of lemmy ? Nextcloud is good as it has a lot of plugins for sharing photos and chatting etc. Video conferencing It would be worth looking at something like https://www.freedombox.org/ as it's all self-contained, and might be easier to set up. at least as a proof of concept?