Meshtastic

It works best when you give one away OR meet up with your local community to be honest. Its like a remote pager at best so keep in mind, meshtastic can only do text. Some places (like mine) have over 100 active nodes so we talk about all kinds of things. Others have just the person who bought it.

I like traveling with one and seeing who I get.

They didn’t find any nodes, yet. Somebody has to start, by expanding the reach of a current network, or starting one in a more empty area.

If the tech behind this interests you, and you have some discretionary budget, I say do it anyway. You get a new toy, new knowledge, and now the best part:

The next guy who gets discouraged by the idea of no connections, has a connection. Now there’s two nodes.

You can chat with strangers if you wish. Coming from the amateur radio scene, I am quite used to doing this on a frequent basis, and it's a lot of fun to just see who is around and strike up a conversation. At night, we frequently get banned openings and you can see nodes from several hundred miles away.

Edit: My node is about the size of a credit card and just slightly thicker. And yet I'm able to chat with the router four miles away. I do admit, though, that not having the router nearby would make it less fun.

Edit 2: These radios can pick up stupid weak signals, so even if you could not get a message across the node information and location very well may get across. So if you needed to, you could change your long name to something like SOS, longitude latitude,