I've seen several bigger Meshtastic networks in Europe that suffer from a dramatic unreliability.
Everything beyond 1 Hop is often unusable. The public chat room only sees fragments of discussions. This causes big frustration within the community.
MT clients are just too chatty. That most Roles can act as a (delayed) Router was IMHO a bad design decision.
Also that they blocked the term "Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a bad taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.
(The two amazon links for the antenna upgrade and pair of radios is swapped, if you're looking for the one, click the other)
Yay! Now you can enjoy the 8543 device roles Meshtastic has to offer, and see the static position and battery level eating away at airtime utilization.
How exciting!
Meshtastic is a bad protocol developed by toxic people in way over their heads.
Beware of using their trademark! They’ll send you a cease and desist letter.
Also Meshtastic codebase is the awful mess - one of the many examples when Arduinoslop became something bigger than quick prototype.
You seemed to have made an account just for this reply. Care to explain the cynicism? I’m out of the loop with the toxicity.
I'm not OP, but there's a lot of criticism of meshtastic from people knowledgable about mesh networks. I also have been critical of meshtastic on this site.
Here's an example of a good criticism: https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215
I have no experience with the community, but if they couldn't have been bothered with understanding AlohaNet from several decades previous, than maybe it's not surprising.
I myself have been fairly critical of meshtastic, you can probably search for bb88 and meshtastic to find more criticisms.
To save you some time, 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.
It's not clear to me which portions of that very long newsletter are responding specifically to Meshtastic, but it seems like the most relevant section starts by listing some challenges but offers nothing in the way of solutions except to digress into talking about a wildly different class of radio hardware (SDRs that can monitor many channels at once).
So you mean other than these sections right?
"Thought experiments about mesh networking"
"Hard Lessons Learned -- What not to do"
"Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking"
Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand."
Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.
How about you make an actual argument here in this thread, instead of vaguely gesturing at an excessively long newsletter and claiming there's relevant substance in there somewhere? Or at least tell me if I've incorrectly interpreted the "Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking" section as listing problems but no solutions aside from buying a radically different (more expensive and power-hungry) type of radio?
Try making some specific suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities and constraints of such a network.
The Meshtastic list of networks is nice, but it is missing several. For example, the lack of listings in North Carolina led me to find https://ncmesh.net/.
Are meshtastic nodes still spamming their battery status over the network?
Have they figured out that flood routing is a terrible routing mechanism?
Is it imperfect in an unusuable way? Do you have links to alternatives?
Meshcore is the obvious quick answer to alternatives to flood routing
I'm ignorant of mesh technologies, but can somebody explain to me why they are using MQTT in their stack? Topics and pub-sub over TCP doesn't sound like a mesh-y kind of thing. Does it work well in this context?
The mesh isn't doing MQTT or TCP. They're using MQTT to bridge between meshes, with mesh nodes that have an internet connection or are paired to a smartphone with an internet connection relaying mesh traffic with an MQTT server.