Comment by wkjagt
2 years ago
Lovely idea. I’ve been thinking of “small scale web things” a lot recently, as I’ve been growing more and more tired of the planet scale web. I live in a small village in Canada and it would be nice to have something “village scale” that is only of interest, and as such perfectly adapted to only our village. Because it’s so small scale (we’re only a couple thousand), it can run on something in my closet. If it goes down for some reason, there’s no being angry with some large corporation behind it because it’s just me, and we mostly all know (of) each other here. If it’s temporarily down because or a power outage (which happens quite regularly here, especially during snow storms), even that will feel local: there’s a good chance users will have the same power outage. I’m probably being idealist and I’ll never do anything like this. Part of me also knows that most people will just continue using Facebook groups etc anyway.
While I am very much aligned with you that the “planet scale” stuff is tiring, I think you’re falling into a trap I myself often find myself in of “I want to create something. What can I create?”
It doesn’t actually make any sense for anyone except you, because fundamentally you’ve not actually got a product, you’ve only got a market.
Bear in mind that it’s perfectly legitimate to scratch your own itch and just build something for the sake of building it, and that’s a home-cooked meal too.
I'm trying to get as many people I know onto Meshtastic as possible. $25 hardware, no central server(I quite like not having home servers to maintain!), no ham licence, phone-based control.
Eventually, of course, I'd like to do Some Really Cool Project with it beyond the default functionality, but I have no idea what.
I never heard of Meshtastic. Looks very interesting. Going to read up on it for sure, thanks for sharing!