exactly. we need to decentralise communication very desperately considering the direction big tech and the entire world seems to be going in. we're planning on supporting LoRa radios as relays in this app as well.

i was thinking we can crowdfund a few but then they need very tech forward people to set up, which are scarce. most "tech people" in india including most engineers, are just corporate slaves with no thinking for themselves. Open Source enthusiasts are so rare.

This is also a reason to have functional LoraWan mesh network

fyi LoRa is a useful building block for building offline (non-internet) mesh networks but LoRaWAN is not: LoRaWAN is for IP-over-LoRa and it requires one of the nodes to have internet access to talk to a centralized server which mediates everything. (tldr: forget about LoRaWAN.)

Sorry I don't have time to braindump on other things in this space, but I will say https://columba.network/ looks interesting - it is a reticulum client for android which can use LoRa (if you have a LoRa radio) and also BLE (100m range) and WiFi (both locally to other nodes and to the internet to talk to distant nodes). I have not actually tried Columba myself, but i think it looks promising.

edit: looking closer i think the one big missing feature in Columba for this type of application is group chat. Unfortunately Reticulum doesn't have a decentralized group chat yet; its 1:1 chat protocol (LXMF) is completely decentralized (two people can keep talking if they're in range of each other even when they can't see anyone else in the mesh) but the group chat protocol it has now (called RRC, similar to IRC) requires a centralized relay server. You can run an RRC relay yourself, including on a non-internet-connected network, but it only works for people who are able to reach that relay (and it doesn't keep history so you miss what was said while you couldn't reach it). I see that the Columba author has actually implemented RRC for Android, but it's currently in a separate app called eridanus. I don't know if anyone is trying to build a decentralized group chat protocol on top of reticulum yet but probably someone is. It's a very complicated problem to solve well, though.