It’s not p2p but at least many years ago:

SMS.

If the Internet outage is local then the towers would still work and you’d be able to get texts. I went through a few storms where wired home internet was down, the towers weren’t giving me a data connection (no mobile web browsing or anything), but I was able to send and receive texts.

If you really care about what you’re asking after, do what someone else said and get a radio license. It’s 150 year old technology and every time something happens radio operators pop up some kind of emergency communications or bridge to the internet through repeaters or something.

https://adps-project.org/

The first thing that comes to mind is Meshtastic: https://meshtastic.org/

I mean this is a terrible answer, but DS pictochat fits that

Meshtastic can be encrypted and is LoRa based. Can easily hit nodes dozens of miles away with a good line of sight. It also relays messages across nodes to reach even further distances.

Depending on how far you're willing to push the definition of "messaging" you could look into getting your ham radio license. It can't possibly be censored and allows you to communicate all over the world. You can even build your own radios if a government cracks down on them for some reason.

Thereis stuff like

https://meshtastic.org/

https://unsigned.io/private-messaging-over-lora/

Besides the already mentioned [Briar] (https://briarproject.org/), there's Berty, can't speak to its quality since I never used it, but I always found the project neat in and of itself

Yes, it's possible. To be honest, I find it very sad that we have grown so dependent on ISP and big telecom companies to have a working network.

In theory, you could have an infrastructure in your neighborhood and be able to play Quake with your neighbors without making use of the phone line at all, completely free of monthly fees and with a very efficient and fast connection too! you'd just need cabling connecting the apartments/houses and some decent routers controlling/restricting access on each subnet. It's a pity that's not a standard thing when designing residences.

Though less efficient and more limited in range, you can technically do it with Wifi and mesh networking too... there are projects like B.A.T.M.A.N (https://www.open-mesh.org/), however, it's not very user-friendly to set up. I believe there have been some projects that attempted to launch embedded devices to act as mini routers for this, but the spread has not been wide enough to make it worth it, sadly.

Check out Reticulum Network Stack using LORA radio. Works really well.

http://reticulum.network/

Briar or meshtastic

Briar has a mesh mode. And i think there was a matrix app doing this too?

Telegram isn't P2P and isn't recommended. Signal is good, but not P2P. Matrix is decentralized, not P2P. SimpleX is P2P, I think, but not sure.

If you don't want to use internet the only ways are to use radio or deploy your own network infrastructure (optic fiber or cell tower), so there's no really any messaging app that can be used without internet. Briar can use Bluetooth but with a limited range, needing an actual dense mesh network.

There used to be one years ago that used WiFi radios or Bluetooth or whatever so you could chat to people near you... I totally forget what it was called though.

yggmail is a fairly obscure and experimental take on email on a mesh network: https://github.com/neilalexander/yggmail

Surprised nobody mentioned scuttlebutt yet https://scuttlebutt.nz/

yes, a lot of people were using those kinds of apps during the free hong kong protests, they go from device-to-device with no internet in between.

No idea what the app is called, but apps like those exist

Yea but there are android versions too. Its to send files over WiFi direct phone to phone with no network but some also have chat.

positive-intentions is a decentralised P2P chat app. https://positive-intentions.com/

This one works, if you don't mind a little diy and texting only: https://circuitmess.com/products/chatter-lora-communication-device

I think SimpleX is mesh?

scratch telegram off that list, put Session messenger there instead.

Telegram isn't private, one guy has the master key to the whole thing

wouldn't a cheap walkie-talkie be more practical in that situation?

i remember using this app some time ago ☞ https://f-droid.org/packages/org.jsl.wfwt/

@Ju135 Briar over WiFi or Bluetooth.