Mastodon works as intended and grows reasonably well. NOSTR is quite frankly one of the most relevant innovations on open source forum/communities from the past two decades.

Both serve similar purposes (build online communities) but the while Mastodon uses a traditional server with a federation on top, NOSTR uses the concept of relay.

In essence, your texts never belong to the owner of a server, you send them to any of a thousand volunteer maintained relays and your audience reads them from there. Your identity remains the same, anyone can verify the authenticity of your texts and this is quite a feature on a time that digital censorship increases.

The cost was about 600 USD and was fun, but problematic as it failed to be accepted as valid email address on many websites.

In Portugal +90% of tetra stopped working. DMR only locally.

Satellite APRS continued working. Who will listen? Well, those from north to south on the country were listening. More important, they were listening who was still active because those were the stations running with their own energy because even FM stations started to go down quickly as the generators ran out of fuel.

Had the blackdown lasted a week, those with a 20 euros walkie-talkies would very likely be the only ones still capable of +50 km distance communications and +1700 km reach using satellite APRS text messages.

Try to see from it from that perspective. You really won't have electricity nor cellphone coverage and not even FM in such scenario.. It's all gone.

Because it would likely violate the restrictions setup for the LoRa frequency. Using a normal walkie-talkie has none of those limitations while being cheaper and more versatile.