Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

Mesh networks are the foundation - they are essential to disaster resilience. Then what services to run over them ?

Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster onboarding of actual users ?

Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP. Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in queues practically forever.

Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it !

Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for actual disaster ?

An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.

Post-disaster onboarding is complicated by app store lockdowns and the difficulty of sideloading. Heck, even establishing plain http or self-signed https connections is tricky on phones now.

I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these things, I just don't know where to find it.

Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not widespread yet.

I was just thinking about this sort of thing the other day. Thinking if I need a techno 'bug out' bag, my Macs would be the most useless ones to waste the weight on because if anything happened I'd never be able to reinstall macOS without phoning home to Apple for an activation.

Throw-in a USB key with a Linux distro that works with your Mac. You could also flash Ventoy on it, so that you can have multiple distros in case you end up needing to boot some other machine.