Comment on The offline messaging apps challenging internet shutdowns
XLE@piefed.social 1 week agoI want to like it, but
- the learning curve
- the extra hardware requirements
- the state of the software ecosystem
- the (lack of) reliability in my experience
- schisms with even choosing how to communicate
all make it feel to me like a project for comfortable hobbyists at hackathons, not a serious protest communication tool.
i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
It would be nice if these mesh projects worked together. There are at least three major incompatible LoRa mesh ecosystems. I think only Reticulum has both LoRa and Bluetooth, but Reticulum is possibly the least mature, and it’s even more obscure than Meshtastic. A few phones with Reticulum over LoRa could relay messages from Reticulum over Bluetooth phones over a longer distance, and potentially reach the internet from some distant location.
Columba looks like the app you’d want. I’ve never used it.
XLE@piefed.social 6 days ago
Thank you so much for the Columba recommendation! I played around with it enough to connect two devices over Bluetooth LE, and I assume if I had the extra hardware, I’d be able to use a LoRa radio with it too (looks like the option to flash it is simply built into the app).
I might need to look into the privacy implications of turning on a Bluetooth radio at a local event when a lot of recommendations say you should leave your phone at home, but this at least seems promising if somebody had a second device specifically for these things.