[Groxx]

>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.

[mingus88]

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?

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[bityard]

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

[mschuster91]

The problem is that takes up valuable airtime. The denser the mesh the more airtime is wasted on the junk.

[m4rtink]

In MeshCore a concept of regions has been recently introduced - you can scope channels and messages to a specific geographic region (which is set on a repeater) and it will not propagate outside of the given region.

That way local channels don't need to flood the whole mesh, same as with trying to send a message to someone or reach the management interface of a repeater you know is in a given area.

[mschuster91]

Oh I am aware of that feature.

The problem is, all repeater administrators in a region need to cooperate - and a lot of repeaters are abandoned. And it doesn't help at all if the troll is aware of regions.

[bityard]

It was a joke...

[hylaride]

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...

[Schiendelman]

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

[Groxx]

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.

[bergie]

I'm right now anchored at an atoll in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia. 3/10 boats anchored here have Meshtastic.

[Groxx]

Boating seems like a pretty good fit here, yeah - adhoc and semi local, and everyone already relies on radio for stuff. And no issues with line of sight.

Is there no longer-range p2p digital tech here though? It tooks to me like this would always be island-local, if even that, and probably useless while further out. Though for inland stuff like smaller lakes that's not a problem.

[bergie]

The traditional longer-range P2P is HF radio and maybe Winlink email on that. APRS over HF is also possible, and Reticulum would be too if hams were allowed to use encryption.

On the passage from Panama to Polynesia we had daily HF radio contact with Hawaii and California. Sometimes radio weather was pretty bad, but generally it worked out.

In practice nowadays passage communications for 99% of boats is WhatsApp over Starlink, with maybe Garmin InReach as backup.

[pelotron]

Now we're talking.

[Karrot_Kream]

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.

[throwawaycan]

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.

[mikestorrent]

The Salish Mesh over here on the west coast also gets some pretty good range, though there are lots of holes in the network

[Groxx]

Meshcore seems a lot better thought out in that respect, yea. Flood routing is a very-well-known dead-end.

[Karrot_Kream]

Meshtastic was never designed to be a wide mesh, it was originally meant for personal networks.

[torginus]

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.

[Karrot_Kream]

They don't. Resilience isn't additive. The more nodes you add, the more announcements and traffic you add, which congests the network further. Regular internet topologies work because of high throughput backbones.

[torginus]

my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors.

This is very much like pathfinding in a video game - you know how to get to a next the next grid square, and also your region you are in knows how to get to its neighboring ones - recursively to the top, but said info is distributed heuristically through the network.

Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case.

[Karrot_Kream]

> my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors.

That doesn't change the fact that announces and extra nodes can still degrade performance. For one, it's hard to know whether a new link is better or worse than other existing links. Link conditions can also change which is very common in the kind of mesh networks folks are putting together using LoRA on antennas.

> Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case.

Yes these are called repeater nodes in Meshcore and are already well known. Repeaters still don't have the same QoS that fiber backbones of the usual Internet have. The reason the Internet works well is because your packets are routed from your house eventually to a backbone network that helps the packet get close to its destination, and the backbone networks themselves are very top-down statically routed affairs with high capacity and QoS.

Once all of your repeaters are connected via high QoS fiber links you end up with the Internet topology we already have today.

[robotswantdata]

This is by design. It’s like BBS again

[Joel_Mckay]

Amateur Ham technicians were doing packet radio long before (AX.25) the Internet made it into homes. =3

https://aprs.world/

[alnwlsn]

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!

[sehugg]

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.

[alnwlsn]

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.