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.

> 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

The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.

The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service provided by someone just setting up solar panels and inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent of starting a skyscraper building company based on your experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else will get hurt.

Probably taking the "someone gets hurt" part too literally, but inverters do turn off their outputs when the grid goes down. It would take a lot of inverters to make all the other inverters believe that the local part of grid hasn't bee disconnected. I wouldn't be surprised if they had special logic to detect even that case. Of course, there is the case of simply having too much unregulated input to the grid, causing instability. But AFAIK that has never happened anywhere, at least not in a way bad enough to make the news. It is bound to happen if current trends continue, but appropriate actions will be taken at that point and have been taken in large solar installations.