This is so super cool!

About that pub idea.

It could be super awesome to put a solar powered headless Raspberrypi 3b (are 15 bucks these days) somewhere that when it boots activates:

• An ssb-pub to collect data and be a "central" identity in a village (probably better than a room in this case, since most people tend to be out of range).
• A small nginx module with port 80 broadcasting an invite page and a catch-all for all http traffic (should automatically redirect "login to public wifi" pop ups on mobile phones)
• A wifi hotspot

then you basically put that somewhere central or in the house of someone trustworthy
And boom you have an "SSB Townhall" with gossip for people to hook into!

I'll put a raspberry ROM together after the festivities today/tomorrow!

could even combine that with a LoRa GPIO module to create a 20-50km loraWAN network link between the raspberries.

I need to really stop geeking now and focus on my christmas baking things, but this is super cool!

A good part of that has been done with the #community-server, I'll soon get to it on the Tool Reviews. I think you'll find it interesting.

Thanks for the awesome thoughts @Hendrik Peter!