I have been researching along these same lines for a while now as well, ad-hoc/mesh network messaging. My use case would be an amateur radio mesh network. For a

I have been researching along these same lines for a while now as well, ad-hoc/mesh network messaging. My use case would be an amateur radio mesh network. For a while, I was investigating running matrix.org servers on raspberry pis, connected to a mesh network without internet. And that does work, the closest I've come to a great solution. But I had never heard of scuttlebut until now. This looks even more ideal. In amateur radio, everyone self identifies with their call sign, this follows the same model. For amateur radio, there is a restriction against encryption (intent to obscure or hide the message), but the public messages would be fine. Private messages (being encrypted for only those the right keys) might be a legal issue, so for a legit amateur radio deployment, the client would have to disable that (or at least operators would have to be educated that private messages may violate fcc rules).