Useful P2P apps that would work during a natural disaster or other offline situation?

Questions
1

There doesn’t seem to be any thread on this so far.

Question: What P2P apps would actually work during a disaster scenario? I assume Briar and Quiet would be the default answers here.

Off hand, I’m thinking a totally offline situations with groups of people in relative proximity, though a longer LOS would be better than just BT distance. Honestly, if I’m within BT distance, I can talk loudly and they’ll hear me. Which, sure, not private, but the point is that without internet what would a community best use for a local network messaging app?

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Are we talking about a rolling power outage, or prepping for The Walking Dead? Two VERY different threat models

The distinction I see is whether your threat model allows for power & networking to a server, that’ll let you maintain any array of selfhosted apps. But if we’re talking phones alone, youre pretty much limited to bluetooth

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Does Quiet make use of mesh networking? I know it is P2P but it doesn’t run over existing networks?

Bridgefy is another app. But AFAIK it still has many vulnerabilities.

4

I believe Meshtastic has been gaining a lot of popularity for off-grid end-to-end encrypted communication. It requires specialized hardware but it can work at greater distances than Bluetooth and LANs, which is what Briar is limited to.

There are other ad-hoc and mesh networking protocols out there that are probably better suited for a variety of use cases. I’m not very knowledgeable on them but you can definitely find them by searching for those terms.

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I was thinking along the lines of natural disasters with total infrastructure loss or working in a place removed from connectivity. So Post-Helene NC coordination, or a group of humanitarian workers in the remote Sahel. The world has plenty enough use cases without getting into zombies. So hosting a server isn’t out of the question if it helps make it easier to get others on the app with just an APK install.

@TheDoc Thanks, Meshtastic sounds interesting and while more setup-heavy, also an interesting option.

@Catalyst2422 Bridgefy also sounds cool, I’ll check it out.

Thanks all!

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If its a disaster scenario, usually privacy is temporarily put aside. You can regain privacy and security later if you are kept alive.

I just purchased a 2-way Motorola Walkie Talkie this stormy/typhoon/monsoon season because if most tech down work due to extensive and prolonged power failure, your adversaries tech will also most likely not work as well or have more pressing issue to attend to.

There is certain value to being self sufficient during natural disasters. Sometimes it is a by-product of living in more rural areas.

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Very true

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There’s a lot of “it depends” needed for context. This is not an absolute truth by any means. I’ve worked in developing countries during emergency response, and broadcasting everyone’s information and all your movements is not always a great idea. You’re talking about immediately during an acute disaster. There’s a lot of before and after where privacy is an advantage.

During a famine, refugee crisis, or any other post-disaster recovery, if people hear a rumor of some sort of aid being in a place, they show up because people are desperate and starving. People can and do walk miles from third-hand rumors of a handful of rice. This can, and does, lead to stampedes and crowds crushing against gates when rumors were wrong and there’s nothing there and never was and people get angry. People die based on unsubstantiated rumor, and having all your communications open invites potentially life-threatening problems.

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