This is a helpful discussion - thank you. A technical piece not mentioned above is email - one of the reasons you want to be online and have a domain name is so you can route email to and from your discourse. It’s well nigh impossible to let anyone use your discourse for anything properly without email. You can also do this for free with mailgun (though you do need to provide a credit card).
I’ve been interested in creating an offline, pocket version of my discourse forums for a while now. I am sure there are other similar sized devices with better specs I can choose from to do that.
I live in an earthquake zone on an island, and often I wonder how easy it might be for me to set up a private WAN here in my neighborhood that provides information and a place for neighbors to help one another and share information when the internet and mobile networks go down. When the Internet is available, the forum is accessible as usual. But for when the Internet is not available for whatever reason, it also provides wifi access to a local network for about 100 people. I know this is technically possible and the obstacles can be overcome, but am a bit rusty on my local networking skills.