Comment by dewey
1 day ago
Somewhat related thread from the past days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999636 that also discusses Reticulum which is an interesting project in the same space too.
From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.
It's a natural direction to hop from Meshtastic to Meshcore.io as the community grows.
They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc..
Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes).
The more I play with both the more I respect both projects.
As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.
> As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all.
Indeed, but when talking to friends who find Meshtastic / Meshcore interesting we often also talk about Reticulum as it has some overlaps and is an interesting project.
Seems like Meshtastic could be replaced by something like BitChat (no hardware needed) for smaller groups and adhoc use (like the example you give of a group on a trip)
If you are going to have the setup and work of repeater nodes though doesnt something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense?