Use cases would be regions where wifi is unreliable, on road trips or flights, etc.
I remember some paid apps from years ago, but I imagine there should be good Foss options too
Thanks! That link wants me to add a repo to fdroid, but I was able to find it by searching
That’s because the official f-droid repo is very slow on getting new releases, so they created their own repo so that they can release as fast as they have a new build.
Ive been using Yggdrasil to connect my devices. Unfortunately this doesnt autoconnect wifi, and doesnt have an IM app built for it. It does however allow you to use pretty much anything that uses a direct IPv6 connection, so its really useful to be able to ssh into my devices nearly whenever. Lately Ive been looking at Reticulum and the LXMF protocol built on top of it. I mostly just tried the Android Sideband app, but ran into battery usage issues.
Cool I’ll poke around at the options here. Ultimately it would be nice to have something simple (after some initial setup anyways). In my imaginary scenario, non-techy people would also need the network, but this is still be useful in other cases
Fdroid has a no internet option:
Huh not sure how I missed that, thanks!
Berty is being developed, and might have some promise.
Maybe Jami? https://jami.net/
Not sure what you mean with « mesh network » (I’m not native English) but Telegram is quite cool. It use a small internet debit, as a good native app for phone or pc, file transfer of multiple gb is possible (even more with the paid version), groups and subgroups, …
I’m not sure if that’s the right term, but basically services that don’t require a connection to the wider internet. The post body goes into it a bit more
I use signal day to day, but it would be nice to know about options for a local mesh network before I actually need it.
Telegram requires internet access and even worse, relies on a central server. It’s not a mesh network.
Check out secure scuttlebutt. I think there is even a phone app for it now. It was designed by a guy living on a boat with intermittent network access which is similar to the use case you describe.
There are social networking apps: Planetary and Manyverse.
Planetary is moving to nostr:
Oh, that’s a bit sad(
Yeah… Nostr is full of cryptobros