Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

I've found Meshtastic is simply not ready to be set up in an environment without internet, as I discovered when I brought some of the boards I bought with me on vacation to a rural area with more space to test them, but very limited internet.

The entirety of the meshtastic project is web first.

- To flash your boards, the suggested method is their "Web Flasher", and if you download the firmware source, it depends on PlatformIO (and the internet) to download and install the toolchains and flasher programs you need.

- The clients for meshtastic are available on the app stores, or as a web app at https://client.meshtastic.org/ None of these are offline. I did later learn the boards themselves host the web app, but they still have to be connected to an Wifi AP, you don't get it just by plugging the board into your computer.

- The docs are hosted at https://meshtastic.org/docs. "Download Docs" or "How to self host this project" are not topics described there or anywhere else. A technical person could figure this out, but this is seemingly not a primary concern.

I suppose this is the very point of this post, to get people to have it all set up beforehand, but not even having the docs as a PDF I can read offline? I learned about Meshcore too in this thread, but if I go to their site and the "getting started" guide is a Youtube video, then you're not ready for an emergency!

I only ever flash via CLI or via "drag & drop" method. The web flasher is great for first-timers but there are 100%-offline methods for all the devices.

The android client .apk can be downloaded directly from github at https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android/releases

I do agree though, I feel there should be more effort to support "long term lack of internet" use case.

For this use case - internet resiliency - I suspect the availability of un-flashed LoRa boards will be approximately zero in situations where it's needed. I agree that building an offline capable tool chain would be a good idea (perhaps all you'd need would be RasPi sd cards already flashed with everything needed to flash and configure common LoRa boards, and an archive of android apks?) But if I were allocating internet resiliency club resources, that'd be fairly low down my list.