Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

but who has the gear, who keeps it charged, who actually shows up when the net goes dark. tech's the easy part. the hard part is getting 5 neighbors to agree on a channel, a meeting point, and a backup plan they’ll actually remember.

also, would be interesting to see people test these setups during a planned outage. like simulate a real failure for 24 hours and see what breaks. most systems look solid until you actually need them

That's why you can't rely on it.

If things go bad, you need to own the tech completely. Be able to setup a wifi hotspot with services that can help your community (wikipedia, openstreetmaps, low-res movies), or have pendrives with critical knowledge ready to be shared, etc.

The low power radio is more of a short term thing, for "what's going on" soon after the first moments of a crisis. Building long-term resilience is much harder.

IMHO, the loss of access to knowledge is much more detrimental than access to a network of people. One can eventually get you into the other, but there's only one you can actually own.

I have a WAP on my shed roof and batteries that can power my gear for a few hours without the grid. In the absence of other WiFi networks the one atop my shed would stand out as a rallying point.

(It's not switched on / connected at the moment - I tested it out during COVID lockdowns, but no one else connected since we didn't have power outages).