I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.

In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles.

However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)

I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.

Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.

The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible.

I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results