>What will be left during a full blackout is people who have government-sanctioned SIM cards with full Internet access (known as "white SIMs") to propagandize on social networks in favor of the reigme when everyone else is disconnected and a tiny set of people who have Starlink.

One would think this is exactly the sort of circumstances under which store-and-forward/delay-tolerant routing would be useful. Years before Jack Dorsey thought of bitchat[0] I had the same idea, but never pursued it because I live in a western country but not in a "tech city", in other words, nobody around here is interested in being an early adopter of an app primarily of use only to preppers or people living under repressive authoritarian regimes.

Anyways, it's a great idea in theory, as the techno-anarchist preppers that LARP with off-the-shelf lilygo LoRa tranceivers will be happy to tell you. But in practice nobody who actually could benefit from these seems to adopt these things. Or at least I never hear about it, if they indeed do. Perhaps today's internet blackouts are too transient for a 2026 version of samizdat to develop?

Do the people you know inside Iran plan to just wait it out, or do they have some other solution ready for a total blackout?

[0] https://bitchat.free/

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tgma 3 hours ago | parent [-]

To be clear while the annoying firewall has been a forever thing, and even grandmas know how to use VPNs day-to-day to access Instagram, a full, long-term blackout, has been a relatively new thing, so I don't think there's enough prep for that. Bitchat was certainly something that was spoken about after the January protests and before the war broke out. There was even a thief who cloned and renamed it something Persian without attribution and with shady security and the Bitchat guy got upset about it just a few weeks ago.

There are some government-sanctioned messengers that apparently keep working but some people would not use it as they are completely insecure and watched by big brother, of course. The biggest issue is getting data out of the country not internal comms (e.g. video evidence of massacre, for example, so that some poeple like in this very thread don't get the ammo to whitewash the regime, intentionally or accidentally.)

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stackghost 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>The biggest issue is getting data out of the country not internal comms

No doubt. Unless there's somebody friendly just across the border in Azerbaijan or Basrah or something, I don't see how they'd do it. Maybe point a dish and establish a point to point link, but you'd need to pre-arrange that.

	▲	tgma 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think what you are suggesting is more practical today than before, since there are at least a few people who have some sort of access. The real catch is really the prep, or lack thereof. The anecdotes around me is they are hoping (perhaps wishfully) for a total regime collapse and internet freedom relatively soon.