Meshtastic is an open-source project using low cost LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without little or no communications infrastructure. It’s a portmanteau of Mesh and “fantastic”.
I found it shared on Facebook, which lead me to the subreddit post, which lead me to reading more about it and even finding Lemmy communities and local groups!
https://mander.xyz/c/meshtastic
I also made sure to check if this wasn’t a hail corporate thing. And I also felt like I missed the era of homemade radios. So this is exciting for me!
I’ve gone down parts of this rabbit hole (reading, not implementation). Wish I could guarantee that I could set anything up (including just setting up Meshtastic nodes in fun places) without getting arrested for setting up what can only look like an espionage infrastructure network to the government.