Posted by ColinWright 1 day ago
The edges drawn are between nodes that have been able to hear each other in the last 24 hours, based on observed traceroute packets.
(Even then, it’s only a subset of the actually-connected nodes: the map only shows nodes that have published their position on the public channel, and have set a flag that their data is okay to uplink to a server over MQTT.)
But it’s the only radio-based mesh network I’ve ever “seen” anyone else on.
Mesh topology like this is cool, and the concept is cool. Meshtastic as an organization with one of their leadership being a lawyer and being very litiguous to protect their naming scheme, not so much. They go after so many projects, ideas and other things that say they are 'Meshtastic' powered. There's a whole discord of them. It is disheartening and very jarring. They want to use the moniker of M-Powered or M-PWRD which has no identity or meaning.
For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it.
Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real world given folks are standing up solar powered radios attached to fixed points and then trying to send messages from their phones.
Edit: I guess meshcore isn't really a real project.
One guy associated with the project, but never a contributor to the firmware, decided to create his own vibe-coded client/app and to trademark the name of the project. The rest of the team said "no" to that and continued doing what they were doing before.
The reason Meshcore works better for texting is the different routing. It has nothing to do with the recent drama.
I'd argue at this point there's more MeshCore networks in the world than Meshtastic
First, the biggest issue r/n is the concern that external internet will be limited to a point of no return, for this meshtastic is quite useless because to go across the border you need powerful transmitters and risk of placing and maintaining them near the border. In russia this is not only risk of going to prison but also being literally shot if border patrol/FSB overreacts. Even if you're successful bandwidth is miniscule compared to what a modern country needs to communicate internationally.
Second, due to Ukraine piggybacking on cellular networks for drone targeting/control cell service is frequently disrupted by authorities in the areas of a likely attack (it's obviously as effective as this sounds compounded by general incompetence of the government). While they cannot shut it down completely because russia still doesn't want to go back to the stone age, this concern is largely non-existent for meshtastic though. If it becomes widely popular and coverage expands, it also could be used by Ukraine as a control network, and in this case I would expect russian authorities to just jam the whole frequency range and be done with it. So the moment it becomes viable alternative is the moment it will be shut down.
That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use).
That's with Meshtastic
With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region.
This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
https://www.meshcoretel.ru/en/MOW/map
Maybe other maps too...
I thing Russia's main problem (not only with mesh) is that you have millions of people living in or near few cities and very few inbetween.
And those living "inbetween" typically have no money or time for things like mesh, they are struggling with simplier things.
It's just a personal opinion, but I really think this is not the case in reality.
Those guys in the middle of nowhere are the biggest geeks in LoRa networks. They have more practical scenarios, more to gain and better conditions for great distances.
A friend of mine lives far away from me, barely populated area, a big city in between of us. He struggled to get any network traffic, but now he uses narrow antennas to point to particular repeaters and suddenly the whole metropolis is open to him. We talk with acceptable delivery rates (I'm guessing 70%, which is actually very decent in dense area like mine). He is currently trying to expand his local network. His neighbors are less technical, but they have frequent power failures and need alternative way to reach each other.
On the other hand there is A LOT of client nodes and repeaters in my city. Many struggle to reach even a single repeater - hard to access roofs, high buildings, crowded network with plenty of conflicts. This kills motivation for many.
Population dynamics in Russia are vastly different than in the West.
Geeks don't exist or survive in the countryside.
Not only it's abject poverty, it's also the culture that penalizes anyone who sticks out.
Russian countryside is kept poor and uneducated with no opportunities other than signing a military contract. That's how Russia was able to fight its 3-day invasion of Ukraine for 4 years without doing a full scale mobilization.
Anyone who even knows what a "mesh network" is would be in a city.
That's one aspect in which Ukraine and Russia are different.
You could also use their site planner to plan out optimal placement: https://site.meshtastic.org/
https://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html
Reticulum is an open-source, cryptography-based networking stack designed to build secure, resilient, and decentralized low-bandwidth wide-area networks using readily available hardware. It operates efficiently over various mediums like LoRa, WiFi, Ethernet, and serial connections, enabling autonomous communication that cannot be easily censored, surveilled, or controlled
Since wired internal connection inside Russia is not limited, so _for now_ there is no need in dense LoRa meshes - Meshtastic mqtt transport will work just fine.
Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.
6 degrees of separation is probably the intended design constraint, assuming there are sufficient nodes to do long range propagation it would work, so 3 bits should be enough in theory. Or passive repeaters as you suggest to go even further. But it seems in practice to be insufficient.
Perhaps this is the reason Reticulum works so well? hop limit of 255, support for any transport mechnism so a fragmented internet is still suitable for long range propagation.
Perhaps a per node hash of known recent routes to avoid flooding every single time and using flooding as a backup.
LoRA is also used extensively for hobby size UAV handheld controller/ground control station to air unit controls, and in its narrower channel sizes can be very long range. The well known TBS crossfire serial bridge radio system which predates LoRA by a number of years uses a chipset that is sort of an ancestor of current-gen LoRA stuff.
This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.
In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound.
I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days