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by 2b3a51 1150 days ago
Just wondering aloud: once a region has a number of villages with these services going well, perhaps a low bandwidth mesh network between them would allow a slow messaging service like email to exist?
3 comments

Low bandwidth mesh for email ought to be viable, I'm sure that used telecoms equipment could enable a 'good enough' network, although perhaps using QRP APRS equipment would reduce the cost when starting from an energy demands point of view, and better account for the fact that packets will occasionally have to wait a few hours until the batteries in other nodes are charged.
The solution between villages could be LoRa since it is cheap, less than 50 euro per device albeit too high-tech.

A lower tech option is plain old radio, for example: https://frn.dc4fs.de/

Text does not consume meaningful bandwidth, so a mesh network should allow IM. (You’d need to limit torrenting, video, and hi-res audio)

Email and ssb can be supported by having a bicycle and a thumb drive.