SimpleX is getting a lot of love but why not Briar? Built in mesh networking capabilities...if it was as ubiquitous as WhatsApp then you'd hardly need the interwebs to communicate, at least locally.
Discussion
Never really had the chance to use briar. I like the idea of it though.
Briar needs to run in the background to receive messages. Mesh networking is only useful if there is no internet access.
That's precisely why I'd like to see it as widely used as WhatsApp, in the event of an outage there's still a way to communicate then, so long as there's enough people around you
Why? Do you live in a rural area?
Nah, I'm usually out on my boat away from everyone, but when I'm in town I'm usually in the most densely packed city in the UK - there, in theory, if enough people used it, we could easily communicate with people several miles away in the event of an internet outage...I'm actually really keen to see how this meshtastic stuff works out, with people experimenting with making it work with nostr and ecash
Ham radio mesh is a better approach cause the distance between links can be miles.
Is the new LoRa tech similar/interoperable with typical ham radio frequencies/tech? I like the idea of being able to set up several base stations that'd allow longer range comms but I really don't know enough about it
Looked at the diagram again. LoRa requires special equipment which is likely expensive. Otherwise it's great.