Yeah, this mirrors my experience trying to get FireChat to work at Las Vegas EDC years prior. Unfortunate to see progress is about the same.

Going to Burning Man for the first time this year. Some of my campmates are keen on giving mesh networking another shot through https://www.burningmesh.org/. Will be interesting to see if using dedicated hardware, rather than just software on phones, makes connectivity & communication more reliable.

I am interested to hear if you also try bitchat at the burn.