Sorry, maybe it’s me but I don’t find it clear what you need. Like, the actual scope of all of this. And which are the 2 communities you wanna link? Actual physical communities and so you are building a physical network? I’m not sure what are you aiming for 😮

I’m struggling to see how this post relates to the [email protected] community tbh.

maybe you’ll find this useful or interesting: https://meshtastic.org/

To be totally honest I didn’t look through everything you posted, but I’ve toyed with the idea of intranets myself and have come up with a handful of tools I really like.

• Tailscale can be used when there is a necessity to connect remote locations over “The Internet”. It is a private VPN that provides ip addresses for connected devices that are only usable to other devices within your Tailnet
• Syncthing can be spun up very quickly to distribute and sync files across devices on the local network, within your Tailnet, and yes over “The Internet” if need be. This is not full on web server level of hosting, but it can get some things off the ground quickly.

The way I’ve used this to make an “Intranet” is outlined here. I use Obsidian for a lot of note taking, link storage, and general information gathering and navigating. Obsidian stores all it’s files as plain text in a normal folder structure, but this could also be done with htlm files and a normal browser. I can target any portion of these folders with Syncthing and keep them updated across all my devices through my Tailnet. The broader usage of this begins to get into the idea of an intranet.

Let’s say I meet someone within this community, or maybe from one of the other locations. We get to talking and decide to exchange information from our respective collections. I fire up an ad hoc WiFi network off of say my phone, or a small portable router, add them to my Tailnet, which could even be optional given Syncthing’s built in encryption, add their devices Syncthing ID to the folder I want to share with them. They download a local copy of whatever data I want, and then can return to a hub of their own, maybe a home network, or a larger community wide network. Target the new data they have acquired, and sync it to the hub. We could then remove each other from our Tailnets and Syncthing instances, or leave them so we can automatically update differences when in proximity.

That’s a rough idea of how I think this system could be used for a more “personal” internet. One that focuses more on direct and intentional communication and data storage, where each user or group of users is basically selecting which data they value enough to commit drive space to. I have also researched medium and long range “WiFi” networks using radio or other signals to trickle sync nodes over longer distances. I’ve even been inspired by Factorio’s logistic drone networks and thought to attach portable routers, single board computers, and storage drives to drones or even solar gliders that can trickle sync to nodes they pass over.

Just some ideas that don’t quite fit the different systems you mentioned, but I think are a bit easier to spin up for individual users, and could decentralize the load of what you are trying to do even more. Could maybe post this in some of the other FOSS/networking/linux/privacy communities, but I’d maybe clean up the post a bit and make it clearer what you are after.

How far apart are your 2 communities and what size user base are you expecting?

If they’re closeish there are probably some point to point network options you could experiment with for a low bandwidth backup link.

Expected users really just determines if you need things like load balancing, identity management, etc.

zrok might be helpful. looks like it’s an alternative to tailscale.

Wot

The selection of which software to use heavily depends on the scope of your project as well as the knowledge of the people maintaining it. As a rule of thumb, always choose the more minimal one over the complicated feature rich one. Most of these software are over engineered anyway.

Anyway, If it’s just communication, use IRC! It’s easy setup an IRC server and install clients on all the devices in the community.

Or if you are aiming for survival, use radio. Like have a proper ham radio setup, it’s much more resilient and reliable (survival stuff is best be kept low tech.)

I’m sorry I have zero knowledge about intranet/extranet stuff. Ig if requires setting up your own like routers and direct wiring between the two communities.

Reticulum and Nomad Network might be what you need.