While I am v excited by growing a civilian-owned and operated E2EE carrier agnostic WAN mesh, IME this desire is rare & for most, overkill. Most seem to solely seek a low-fiddle resilience fallback for staying in touch with those they care about

Many experiments are happening with autonomous LoRa nodes e.g., microReticulum, and they are becoming usable as of writing. Ratspeak made firmware for a tdeck and cardputer as autonomous devices. Someone else made an implementation on heltec v4.

There are autonomous nodes around from different experimentation and this will only increase and become more stable. I will see if I can find or compose a list of such firmware.

If you are looking for a hardware-agnostic networking stack that can be mixed with other p2p software i also find Reticulum to be the more interesting one and where i channel my energy and contribution (capacity are limited so I need to choose wisely), versus other more usage-specific alternatives. My view on this is more based on my belief in it rather than its current utilitarian purposes, although i do think this will flourish in the near-future

If you merely need private messaging in the event of blackout, then Meshcore or Meshtastic are gtg. I prefer flex & ethos of the latter, though MC has better sec & more suited to very large areas. In my region MT works v well, texting nodes 150km away