IMHO this article misses a couple really important points.
First, if the mesh can use Internet or other transports then it will, and it will be built out in a way where these become a necessity. If all you want is a silly new way to text your friends, then something like reticulum will be ok. But if you want a serious solution for emergency response and free communication -- free as in "no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what" then building something independent from scratch is critically important.
Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.
This is hugely important for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. Especially in places prone to any form of natural disaster.
It's certainly the early days, and it's clear that there's a long way to go, but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become.
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.
In Montréal we've rebooted Réseau Libre which used to be a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago.
It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me.
Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app.
On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc. and I fear we're wasting time when in the end what wins is controlling the backbone bandwidth, but with the added difficulty of a p2p mesh.
I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
>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.
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
> 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
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.
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!
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.
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.
Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!
WCMesh in California covers a few hundred miles of southern California on Meshcore.... That isn't flat. It really just depends on buy-in in the local region.
Uhhhh ... No. You must have read that it uses the same frequency 900mhz, but did you actually try using it? When I first got on meshcore here NJ i immediately connected with my closest neighbor repeater 20 miles away which then in turn connected me to the local NJ/PA mesh which spans almost 200 miles wide. I don't recall any cordless telephone ever doing that...
I mean morse code on GMRS is actually an amazingly strong physics solution. Take the benefits of VHF propagation and combine it with high power limits and a coding scheme that is on par with FT8 for noisy channel resilience. No way a potato powered microwave is going to compete.
915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.
Am I the only one who thinks MeshCore shouldn’t be called „off grid“?
Unlike Meshtastic and Reticulum, the need for router nodes is built into the protocol itself in MeshCore. And while nodes are cheap and amateurs can put them up, that is still a grid that has to exist for your MeshCore client to be useful…
No, you're not alone. MeshCore is very neat tech, but I love that you can show up to, say, a music fest with a few Meshtastic radios and voila, instant mesh. To me, it feels more in the spirit of the thing. That's purely subjective, but that's how I see it.
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.
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.
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.
I think there are people playing with Halow with Reticulum. That's one advantage of having a multi-transport system. There is also a Bluetooth transport now:
https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=720
Do you know what the MSS is on a Halow network? Curious if it makes sense to run usual TCP and UDP based applications on them or whether we would need to switch to things like CoAP.
I got into it too back in 2012. Frankly it’s not a very interesting space unless you’re trying to circumvent nation wide internet shutdowns because for everything else encrypted chat channels serve the same purpose and everyone is doing it (WhatsApp, signal, telegram etc)
First, if the mesh can use Internet or other transports then it will, and it will be built out in a way where these become a necessity. If all you want is a silly new way to text your friends, then something like reticulum will be ok. But if you want a serious solution for emergency response and free communication -- free as in "no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what" then building something independent from scratch is critically important.
Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.
This is hugely important for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. Especially in places prone to any form of natural disaster.
It's certainly the early days, and it's clear that there's a long way to go, but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become.
Like the internet, but self-configuring and peer to peer.
Yes, there are lots of technical and social challenges, but I don't believe they are unsolvable.
I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
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.
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?
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.
A great video on the topic from a few years ago (How to Radicalize a Normie): https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g
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!
https://aprs.world/
Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!
915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.
Unlike Meshtastic and Reticulum, the need for router nodes is built into the protocol itself in MeshCore. And while nodes are cheap and amateurs can put them up, that is still a grid that has to exist for your MeshCore client to be useful…
However, Reticulum has its own active "small web" implementation with NomadNet and the Micron markup.
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.