Please note that everything you mention here is just based on the protocol today. Our Chief Scientist just began and within months our protocol will be able to do a lot more — not to mention next year and beyond! So take today’s specs with a grain of salt 
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That is what I like to hear! Take a good idea, tear it apart, rebuild it, and make it better! Repeat.
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Always! 
That’s why it’s so important that goTenna Mesh has a bootloader for all sorts of new firmware goodies. Honestly, I can’t wait. I think goTenna Mesh today is amazing, but I’m so excited for what’s ahead.
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Yes. I’ve been following them for a while. That would’ve been the ideal system to build out, but they seem to be severely short on manpower, so little development has been made to the app recently. Serval is capable of phone to phone communication over Bluetooth and WiFi for both text messaging and calls, and with their Serval Mesh Extenders, text messaging over long distances is possible by using the 900 MHz ISM band (same as GoTenna Mesh). They also have several other features that they’ve been testing but haven’t made public (offline maps, internet sharing on the mesh, etc.).
The biggest drawback that I saw, besides being unpolished/not working correctly on some phones, is that the app is Android only for now. That limitation prevents Serval from working for me as nearly everyone I know uses iOS.
They’ve been at it for about as long as GoTenna, but GT is considerably further along.
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My immediate thought when I saw the API limitations was that either the units have a low-rate, long-distance radio, or that it is software limited to avoid flooding the ISM band. However, even with the low bitrate, it would still allow something similar to ZeroNet to work. Webpages are initially downloaded the first time you access them (which would take forever), but once you have a copy, any updates can propagate out in a fraction of the time (and your downloaded copy is available for others to access, so you can payload a site between meshes). When you access a site that you’ve previously visited, you’re actually going to your cached version, so subsequent visits load immediately, and updates happen in the background.
I’m currently running ZeroNet on my computer, and the largest site (which is multimedia) that is on my machine is 183 MB. Most sites are under 10 MB, with several at less than 1 MB. The stock app will use up to 30 GB of storage on a computer, which I’m nowhere near close to using up (I’m still at less than 500 MB total). At this time, there is no ZeroNet app for phones.
No, you’re not going to be able to run a YouTube equivalent for a long time yet, but reference sites, forums, social networking, and some others would all work fine over the mesh. This site should have little issue functioning as a ZeroNet site over a mesh. Initially loading the page would suck, but once that’s done, the site should be nearly as quick as it is in its current state with the benefit of being able to read the existing posts while totally offline (no mesh or internet connectivity).
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I have not looked into ZeroNet, but will need to do so. I know there are plenty of offline readers for mobile devices. I wonder if large data could be sent by something like OuterNet for an initial state setup for everyone in the field, with the updates being provided by mesh.
I am reminded of late 90’s and early 2000’s And my first forays into mobile data, where things were sent at 1x speeds, and WAP was used to make things mobile friendly. Is WAP still a thing?
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As a side note, Our first in-home link was at 150 baud, via acoustic coupled modem, acoss Louisville to a DEC8 at UofL. Early-mid '70s.
And it was awesome !
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a PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E with 4MB of ram and a 92MB RP04 was quite comfortable with a 150 baud modem.
The DEC8 probably had 256 KB of RAM if you were lucky.
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I see a few people on here mentioned ZeroNet. I just stumbled onto this today. Is this safe to use / support?
Some info
I remember another thread where there was a sudden great enthusiasm for using goTenna Mesh to power something like Zeronet (perhaps it was Zeronet?) until it was pointed out that bandwidth issues would be a big problem. You’d be waiting all day for a single image…
However, condensing vital info from a curated list of websites could be useful. There’s discussion of things like a dispatcher chatbot for EMS, etc in this thread, which could be a way to address doing that. There’s certainly some potential here with release of the new SDK looming to use it to provide a bridge to access something like Zeronet.