We all know Signal, Matrix, Telegram, SimpleX, etc… But if you can’t access the internet you can’t communicate. Pretty logic. But would it be possible, at least theoretically, to create an app that permits to message people even if the internet goes down?
It might be a dumb question I really have no idea to be honest.
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Yes, it’s possible. To be honest, I find it very sad that we have grown so dependent on ISP and big telecom companies to have a working network.
In theory, you could have an infrastructure in your neighborhood and be able to play Quake with your neighbors without making use of the phone line at all, completely free of monthly fees and with a very efficient and fast connection too! you’d just need cabling connecting the apartments/houses and some decent routers controlling/restricting access on each subnet. It’s a pity that’s not a standard thing when designing residences.
Though less efficient and more limited in range, you can technically do it with Wifi and mesh networking too… there are projects like B.A.T.M.A.N (https://www.open-mesh.org/), however, it’s not very user-friendly to set up. I believe there have been some projects that attempted to launch embedded devices to act as mini routers for this, but the spread has not been wide enough to make it worth it, sadly.
I think SimpleX is mesh?
It’s not p2p but at least many years ago:
SMS.
If the Internet outage is local then the towers would still work and you’d be able to get texts. I went through a few storms where wired home internet was down, the towers weren’t giving me a data connection (no mobile web browsing or anything), but I was able to send and receive texts.
If you really care about what you’re asking after, do what someone else said and get a radio license. It’s 150 year old technology and every time something happens radio operators pop up some kind of emergency communications or bridge to the internet through repeaters or something.
positive-intentions is a decentralised P2P chat app. https://positive-intentions.com/
Briar or meshtastic
This one works, if you don’t mind a little diy and texting only: https://circuitmess.com/products/chatter-lora-communication-device
Telegram isn’t P2P and isn’t recommended. Signal is good, but not P2P. Matrix is decentralized, not P2P. SimpleX is P2P, I think, but not sure.
Simplex uses Severs, you can bring your own one, but it is not peer to peer when talking about direct communication to the recipient
SimpleX uses onion links
This was a common thing that was developed for the international protests after Arab Spring, which would frequently have their Internet shut down as a State tactic to prevent communication amongst protestors.
Mesh net chat apps like FireChat were born in response
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat
Edit: apparently wikipedia says it wasn’t developed for protests, it just happened to be released at the same time
The first thing that comes to mind is Meshtastic: https://meshtastic.org/
Thanks I’ll take a look!
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Bridgefy?
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Briar is the one that was mentioned a lot when the protests were happening in Hong Kong, if that helps 👍
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Yes, sorry. I woke up in the middle of the night, but apparently my brain didn’t…
I’ll correct it now 👍
Bridgefy was used more during protests since it’s available on both iOS and Android, while Briar is Android only.
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Yeah I’m not saying Bridgefy is better, just that it’s available on both major mobile platforms while Briar isn’t. I do prefer Briar feature-wise and privacy-wise.
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I mean this is a terrible answer, but DS pictochat fits that
pictochat FTW
No joke, I was talking about this recently. I feel like niche groups (me included) are just going full-circle back to the DS days
Yea but there are android versions too. Its to send files over WiFi direct phone to phone with no network but some also have chat.
Oh interesting! I’ll take a look into it thanks.
yggmail is a fairly obscure and experimental take on email on a mesh network: https://github.com/neilalexander/yggmail
Would this work through something like meshtastic?
yggmail specifically, probably not. yggdrasil uses TCP/IP and the Meshtastic latencies to perform connections would be too high AFAIK. It would probably only work in a fairly well-connected network. yggdrasil could be used directly over a WiFi protocol but it would need fairly good reception to function.
N.B. I haven’texperimented with this myself.
