Comment by Groxx
18 hours ago
>To be perfectly upfront with you, this post will be glossing over many Meshtastic and MeshCore features, because I feel they are both non-serious solutions compared to Reticulum for reasons I will explain later on in this post.
Yeah, that's the general feel I get every time I poke into Mesh*. Neat radio tech, fun toy to find other nearby nerds, instantly-obvious problems that are fatal to growing beyond being that toy (or small specialized personal nets, where it's totally fine). They feel more like a tech demo than anything actually intended to survive.
Which is fine, you kinda need that to start out, and they do work today. Just... hard to get excited about.
That weakness is a strength.
Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything
How many places like that are left?
> Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything
I wish... the Hamburg Meshcore mesh has some dumbass spammer spamming far-right youtube videos in the public channel for example. And from what I hear, Meshtastic also has issues with this kind of idiots.
Start spamming far-left YouTube videos to the public channel at the same time, according to the general theory of nutball political physics the two should cancel each other out
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I run a few Meshcore nodes in Toronto - mostly as a nerd hobby. In some ways it has the feel of the 1990s internet and in some ways it's the same feel as ham radio . It has smart nerds, but also some unhinged people who are desperate to force people to hear them. Then there are the trolls...
All unmoderated spaces have this problem. That's why the right wing grew so much on gaming forums, because they were extremely unmoderated.
A great video on the topic from a few years ago (How to Radicalize a Normie): https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g
It's well suited for that at the moment, yeah - if that's what you're hoping to find by getting into it, it's pretty cheap and now's a great time.
I think meshes do work extremely well in practice, and are quite resilient with regards to errors, and load balancing, and they get better as you add more nodes.
I think it's perfectly feasible for a small neighborhood of regular people to have internet shared over a wireless mesh network, yielding experience comparable to standard approaches.
I'm right now anchored at an atoll in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia. 3/10 boats anchored here have Meshtastic.
The inherent limitations of free spectrum mesh technologies will never lend itself to a replacement for the Internet so will always largely exist in niches. Niches like personal nets, local nerd networks, or emergency response (tho actual first responders are not the most eager to try this stuff based on my experiences in the community.) All of this can be a feature or a bug depending on whom you ask.
On the mesh in Toronto with meshcore we have regular communication that reach all the way to Buffalo. We are past the « toy » stage, it’s truly impressive.
The Salish Mesh over here on the west coast also gets some pretty good range, though there are lots of holes in the network
Meshcore seems a lot better thought out in that respect, yea. Flood routing is a very-well-known dead-end.
Meshtastic was never designed to be a wide mesh, it was originally meant for personal networks.
This is by design. It’s like BBS again
Amateur Ham technicians were doing packet radio long before (AX.25) the Internet made it into homes. =3
https://aprs.world/
It's pretty hard to imagine anyone "getting serious" with these tiny radios designed for reading gas meters and weather stations and using that to build some kind of off-grid alternate Internet.
I'd almost have more faith on dragging out all the old acoustic coupler modems and building a city-wide string-and-tin-can telephone network.
Of course they are not useless. My hiking/camping friends put together a fun orienteering game which used Meshtastic to do live GPS tracking. Worked great for that. But a country spanning meshternet it is not.
I don't think it needs to be though. There are plenty of things to explore using these things at the local 1-10 km scale.
To be fair it is already a miracle that there is enough Metastatic in my area that I can (sometimes/rarely) send a message between my home and work!
*disclaimer that I am coming off a recent disillusionment with Meshtastic. I thought it would be fun to make a single raspberry pi image with all the dev tools on it to do some off-grid dev/maintenance work if you were to treat this seriously and pretend the main internet is down. That moment came when I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory. Really? I need more than 1GB RAM to compile something used to send short text messages?! That's nuts!
I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory
I think your beef is not with Meshtastic, but with the distro/compiler, and I am going to bet you're compiling C++ with clang.
I don't know man, I was just trying to follow the official build instructions. If that's not Meshtastic I don't know what is.
The (lack of) reliability in the network is the main issue with it though, but that's already been covered elsewhere in this thread.