[xx__yy]

Great to see yet another project to provide "offline"-ish comms. The existing solutions are obviously not good enough yet, hence why all these projects are popping up. I hope we get to a good-enough one soon.

LoRa is great, but the bandwidth is terrible, so you'd be limited to Twitter sized messages when using this comms channel.

[kkfx]

Being a full mesh means an immense overhead, so well... You can't get much performances it you can't give immense bandwidth under the mesh. Though being able to exchange textual messages at a sufficient speed without any centralized infra is VERY important. In case of a real disaster we will been able to communicate at distance anyway and that's extremely valuable. The real point today is how to spread such paradigm to give enough people the ability to emergency comms.

The other critical battle is on another field: makes most people understand the opportunity and necessity of transforming the ISP's little router-server into one's own FLOSS home server with a set of services to reduce dependence on the giants, collecting one's own emails there, personal online backups of one's data/systems, to be paired with an offline one manually connected to the "central point" homeserver every evening or week, having one's own photos, contacts, ... on one's own hardware without needing GAFAM and so on.

We have for example, Umbrel, Start9, Univention, ... which more or less offer an "easy" solution; we have a certain popularity of commercial NAS units, unfortunately not exactly FLOSS and often in violation of the GPL, but we still don't have a general understanding of what can be done and how important it is to do it, starting from one's own domain name, to be citizens of the web just as one is with a postal address in the physical world.

[linsomniac]

Meshcore and Meshtastic are, depending on your area, pretty good for offline comms. They provide a pretty compelling combination of encryption and no license, and there's a fairly lively set of users in my area.

MeshCore is currently budding out, unless you are in one of the few places where it is really entrenched. Just in the last 6 weeks I've been doing it, I've gone from basically receiving 0 messages to having to disconnect my phone from my client node last night because it was going crazy.

Much of the communication is like HAM radio: talking about the mesh.