Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

I tested meshtastic in a major european city with pretty much 100% mesh coverage and its real life performance was quite underwhelming. Often I would receive messages that I could not reply to because of differences in antenna gain and crappy mesh performance. Public chat was either completely dead or flooded with test messages. Everything was super slow because the mesh can’t actually scale that well and craps out with more than a 100 nodes. Even medium fast channel would clog up fast. I would never depend on meshtastic during an emergency because it barely works even when nobody is using it. I think a public wifi mesh would be more worthwhile. Older used wifi routers are pretty much free and in unlimited supply. They use very little power. Everyone already has a compatible client device on their pocket. Sure the mesh would fail during a total blackout but at least it would be useful for something when the power is up.

Yeah, having gone through the blackout in Spain this would be really useful (using phones).

Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.

It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity, mesh networks and satellite internet to get around lazy local ISPs. All we need is a field where robots grow food and we're back in the middle ages but with modern tech. We've even got tech billionaires to stand in as feudal lords and crazy right wing populists instead of inbred kings with weird chins.

Where in the world are you? In the UK I get paid to sell my excess solar back to the grid.

That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.

If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing, where you don’t get charged for the energy you use, but they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't specced for any of this shit.

The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being mostly optional.