Every time I get excited about one of these techs I end up finding it has approx the same range as a late 90s cordless phone unless you live on the Nevada salt flats, and a data rate that could probably be beat out by Morse code on a GMRS radio. Sadly I live in the opposite of that terrain with approx the same population density.<p>Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!
Set up solar nodes last weekend. 200 miles of range now. Nerds, mad ideas. Good times.
This has been on here a couple of times the past few days or weeks. Finally pulled the trigger and bought a Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro for MeshCore. I find the idea of a para-internet just fast enough for text based monomedia content highly appealing. Probably a mix of nostalgia but also realism - my thinking is that a network too slow for pictures / audio / video would elegantly avoid problems like spam and (illegal) pornography by design.
After seeing the Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers post today <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467</a> I wonder if they would pair well with Reticulum
These ideas yes, but these networks already have a concept of message oriented semantics and so there's not much of a need to rebuild most of those protocols. A lot of what Finger, Gopher, et al does is define the application layer semantics to transmit documents over stream oriented protocols.
><i>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.</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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<p>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.
It's quite 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.
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.
This is by design. It’s like BBS again
Saw this at <a href="https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-networks-meshtastic-meshcore-and-reticulum/34963" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/im-getting-into-mesh-net...</a> and thought it was interesting
In general I'm happy the longer range options are about, but I'd much rather see IP based ad-hoc communication. Wifi 802.11ah "halow" is such a more versatile structure than these limited networks.<p>More of everything, of course! But I'm far more interested in making the wifi we have more ad-hoc capable, more useful anywhere any time, for whatever, especially on the longer range bands like 900MHz.