Currently, in the cellular networks of countries, if a government agency declares a state of emergency such as tornado warnings or a public health emergency of some sort, the system can be activated to blare a loud alert tone on your phone and override do not disturb no matter what time of day it is.

I’m thinking we might need to replicate this functionality if we ever want the mesh to replace the cellular networks.

My idea for doing this would be that any message would be technically capable of being an alert message and would come in as a standard text message as it does now. However, what would change would be that upon a new message receive, you would start a timer, and if some user configurable number of, say, thumbs up reactions were also received within that timer frame, it would then blur an emergency alert style tone.

Let’s say Alice has hers set to five, and Bob has his set to ten.

Any new message that comes in would ding both Alice and Bob’s device in the standard way, and at the same time would start a five minute timer, and if Alice received five thumbs up reactions on a message before that five minute period was over, it would blare as an alert. But for Bob, that threshold would have to be ten thumbs up reactions before it would blare as an alert within that five minute frame. Otherwise, nothing would occur.