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.
Depending on how far you’re willing to push the definition of “messaging” you could look into getting your ham radio license. It can’t possibly be censored and allows you to communicate all over the world. You can even build your own radios if a government cracks down on them for some reason.
Briar or meshtastic
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 onion links
Simplex uses Severs, you can bring your own one, but it is not peer to peer when talking about direct communication to the recipient
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
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.
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.
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.
positive-intentions is a decentralised P2P chat app. https://positive-intentions.com/
I think SimpleX is mesh?
The first thing that comes to mind is Meshtastic: https://meshtastic.org/
Thanks I’ll take a look!
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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
Meshtastic can be encrypted and is LoRa based. Can easily hit nodes dozens of miles away with a good line of sight. It also relays messages across nodes to reach even further distances.
