Meshtastic

“Fun to pop on every so often and say hello, see who has new gear, and gauge the activity levels around me.”

“Meshtastic simultaneously has too few nodes for most people to see many reliably, and has a scaling problem where too many nodes where saturate the network.”

“I love that you can show up to, say, a music fest with a few Meshtastic radios and voila, instant mesh.”

“You can get insane distances with great reliability if you place a node strategically on the highest point around.”

“Useful for things like music festivals, campgrounds, having a mesh node in your camper van”

“I've always thought that meshtastic (or something similar) would be great for cruisers.”

“The software works fine if you set up super high bit rate, although you will not like the short range.”

“Meshtastic is horrible in a metro area. The area I live in has a huge user group and it's almost impossible to get a message across more than 3 nodes reliably.”

“I was seriously put off the fact that a node can’t work with multiple clients (like phone and desktop) cooperatively”

“This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed.”

“right now it's just a way to find and talk with other radio/decentralized/emergency-response/the-net-is-doomed-we-need-alternatives nerds”

“I see it as a thing that is fun to play around with now, but which may become critical at some point in the future.”

“spend a week or two sending very slow and unreliably forwarded messages that mostly amount to "hi! i have an ACME 32ABC radio!”

“it's a an interesting technical hobby for those that may get excited when their little 0.25W radio hits a repeater 80km away”

“I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes”

“I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked.”

“I've played with MeshCore and Meshtastic a bit, and while they are fun, the general hype seems overblown”

“MeshCore relies more on dedicated repeater infrastructure, and it's design seems to make it more reliable for longer range communications.”

“because of a few misconfigured nodes, the network was always congested, slow, bloated with messages arriving less than 50% of the time”

“the more dynamic and technically interesting stuff now seems to be with SDR and Meshtastic/Meshcore”

“The current record for ground-to-ground link on meshtastic is a staggering 331km, pretty insane”

“I've been trying to put together an all-inclusive Raspberry Pi image or a live USB for Meshtastic, but it's not quite there yet”

“180 online nodes (300 at max) is not extremely small (and that's our small mesh EU with medium_fast)”

“Mesh is great for bootstrapping and local traffic, but once you care about real data propagation at scale, centralized infrastructure wins almost every time.”

“They aren't useful in antigovernment scenarios because they are trivial to jam and deny use of.”

“I've tested >60km links with Meshtastic without problems and had plenty of SNR left.”

“Meshtastic is both extremely range limited and trivial to DDOS. It's a fun toy protocol but it's not resistant to nation state disruption at all.”

“a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well”

“Meshtastic is a more noisy protocol which is perfect for camping and hiking in small groups”

“Meshtastic can only use one frequency at a time. So, say, a battery status update can stomp on a message trying to get to a meshtastic router.”

“the current architecture, far from supporting hundreds or thousands, won't even support dozens in a small area with meaningful traffic being exchanged”

“it's not entirely fair to criticize Meshtastic for not inventing a revolutionary solution to a very hard problem”

“the number one thing you can do to dramatically improve mesh reliability is moving off of the default frequency”

“I've been spending a lot of time experimenting with and learning about Meshtastic and MeshCore recently”

“I live in a fairly populous city with a bunch of meshtastic nodes, and can't get a message accross from me to my friend who lives one hop away.”

“reasonably good for unplanned and mobile use cases such as hiking, but for building an emplaced network”

“"Toy network" is highly subjective and depends on your (unstated) assumption about what kind of use case you want Meshtastic to fulfill.”

“You end up finding and chatting (often off-mesh!) with people who are within Lora-mesh-distance of you”

“We often sail in places where there's no communication infrastructure, or it is prohibitively expensive.”

“It is gonna take the governments time to figure out what those things are and how to block and attack them.”