'Uncensorable' yes, but still vulnerable to novel government regulation, jamming, rubber hose attack, etc. Folks using Meshtastic in Ukraine rapidly found out that they were advertising their positions, as well, resulting in being struck by opposing forces. I enjoy LARPing as a prepper, but I'm afraid this technology has been demonstrated to fall short in times and places where people really needed to use it in anger.
The moment this sort of technology begins to pose a real threat to the control soft-authoritarian governments like the EU and UK have over the populace, they'll simply ban or regulate it the way they already do guns and large cash transactions, and are currently considering doing with Twitter[1]. Once you break that law, you'll be doing 18 months in prison for your ham hobby.
I suspect we will just have to go back to talking to each other in the pub :-(
This is when you put up a very low to the ground HF dipole and operate the mesh in NVIS (near vertical incidence scattering) donut mode. Your node won't be able to contact anything local but it will contact a ring region about 100 miles around you with a many tens of miles gap. It is much harder to find an NVIS transmitter with multi-lateration which is why it is the mode most commonly used in military operations (for ground troops).
The network stack used in this article is called Reticulum. Reticulum can operate over really any medium that has a MDU of 500 bytes, and a throughput greater than 5 bits.
I've performed this exact test using two HF radio nodes equipped with NVIS antennas operating on the 40 meter band, with each radio 144 km (90 miles) separate in distance. Node 1 was out in the field while Node 2 was back at my house. Node 2 was able to act as a bridge to the outside TCP Testnet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blwNVumLujc
You live in the Western world buddy. You're not going to jail for playing with mesh network gadgets and Twitter isn't going anywhere. There will be the threat of a huge fine for non-compliance, Twitter will threaten to leave the market, users (voters) will freak out, politicians will be like "Crap I'm gonna lose my job" a wrist slap will ensue and we'll all move on.
You guys should really campaign to get real freedom of speech like... properly on the books. Dunno why that isn't a thing.
Look at what's happening in the UK right now to see how illiberal Western democracies can be when up against the wall. Don't forget that it was only about 2-3 years ago that there were temporary going-outside-without-a-good-reason bans in the USA, while Irish police were inspecting people's shopping to make sure they weren't buying anything non-essential[1]. Most recently, the UK has now jailed several people for significant periods for being racist on Twitter. Ireland won't be far behind, because we're not clever enough to write our own laws, preferring to crib from the UK and then ratchet up the severity and hand-wringing during implementation.
Broad liberty is not a thing because people don't know anything different, prefer safety to opportunity, and don't want it badly enough to be willing to clog the courts and jails until the economy suffers. And the power that has become entrenched is more interested in maintaining maximum control/the appearance of harmony, and punishing severely any who dissent, than in doing anything that might see their control diminished. The EU is pushing for 'chat control' (invasive surveillance of all encrypted instant messaging) again, despite it having been defeated previously. Why would encrypted RF comms be treated any differently, especially when it's as simple as passing a law saying 'not permitted without a license as of 1 Jan' and then refusing to issue any licenses?
God's sake, they're lowering all our non-motorway speed limits to 37MPH in October. That's not something esoteric or technical, and in a country with as poor public transport as Ireland, affects pretty much everyone for the worse-- and yet I can't find a single person who has even complained to their representative! Worse, they all seem to be OK with it. Nobody actually asked for this, and everyone is both powerless and uninterested in doing anything about it.
The moment this sort of technology begins to pose a real threat to the control soft-authoritarian governments like the EU and UK have over the populace, they'll simply ban or regulate it the way they already do guns and large cash transactions, and are currently considering doing with Twitter[1]. Once you break that law, you'll be doing 18 months in prison for your ham hobby.
I suspect we will just have to go back to talking to each other in the pub :-(
[1] https://youtu.be/mrTj6XdpXPM