Considering the amount of tech and self hosting types that live in cities, it seems like it would be popular to have little mesh intranets all over the place, but I’m not aware of any.
I read about NYC Mesh a while back, and I wonder if there are other similar things already in widespread use that I just haven’t heard about.
They can still profit indirectly from providing services etc (which is fine)
But even just the fact that in order to use the word “Meshtastic” ™®© I have to read https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/ shows that it does not have “community” vibes but “Meshtastic™®© is ours and we’re just letting you use the source code etc for now” vibes
Again, the fact that it is owned by someone means that the community (probably) does not have control over it, and one day we might need to fork the whole network and migrate every node
If a specific radio is illegal, it’s easy to just find where it’s transmitting from and fine you; they already do this with pirate radio stations
But why be dependent on 2 companies instead of having the option to buy a radio from any company? Why is competition and diversity bad for an independent and off-grid network that we don’t want it to have a single point of failure? 🤔
Not only it can make the network more resilient (which is supposed to be one of the goals), but it allows for experimentation and innovation in new technologies, which you can’t do if you’re locked into using LoRa™®©
Why lock every user into a single technology just because some users want to have a long-lasting battery? (Which btw is probably important for very remote nodes and not the home and portable nodes that I think are more common).
Power efficiency is extremely important for an off-grid network, because it translates more or less directly into battery and especially solar panel area requirements. You need the final node design to be hoistable up the tree.
That’s not what my objection is about 😅 Of course low power consumption is important
My point is about depending an independent peer-to-peer off-grid network on one specific technology
E.g. imagine if TCP/IP, BGP, or HTTP were proprietary (instead of owned by standards organizations), and in order to connect to the Internet you would need to buy a network card that is licensed from the TCP/IP company! But since that’s not the case, people can connect to the Internet using any technology they want (Wi-Fi, Ethernet), but as long as their device uses TCP/IP, anyone can connect with anyone
(PS maybe there is a better physical layer or routing example than the above 🤔 But I think the principle still stands)
Why do I get the feeling that I’m arguing a pointless argument with an LLM? I’m going to put the good-faith effort in for this comment but I’m not going any further.
Yes, that kind of approach can help ensure that open source projects are sustainably maintained.
It’s open source. You always run the risk that you might have to do a hard-fork of any open source software regardless of who maintains it.
Yeah, but that’s true of virtually all methods of communication. That’s a regulatory problem, not a meshtastic or reticulum problem. There is nothing specific about meshtastic/reticulum that makes it resistant to Government censorship. The best you could possibly do with reticulum is stick some messages on a USB drive and pass them to someone else - but then why not just FAT32 format the drive and send your friend some files? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
I feel like you’re arguing in bad faith here. I’ve been trying to help you understand some of the benefits/drawbacks of Reticulum and Meshtastic, not argue that one is inherently better than the other.
LoRa licenses the technology out. You’re not buying the device directly from them. It’s a standard, basically an identifiable brand.
The reason that meshtastic and reticulum are designed primarily to be work over LoRa is because Governments and businesses have done the hard work of setting standards and legislating free and open portions of the spectrum which end-users don’t have to pay to use. This opened up the realistic possibility of private medium-to-long range mesh networks existing in the first place.
Also, do you know that Meshtastic uses a queue messaging format which can be routed over UDP/TCP just like reticulum?
The main first use-case for LoRa was IoT devices where low power is a requirement. Think things like monitoring when gates are open/closed, what the soil temperature is, how much Nitrogen is in soil, etc. I think there are likely waaaay more low power nodes out there than nodes in people’s homes.
It’s great that you’re doing some research and have some ideas that you want to try out, but I think you could probably do with doing a bit more research to shore up your reasoning.