this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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Having played with it a bit, I have very low hopes for Meshtastic.
Being UHF it's very line of sight, and things like trees absorb the signal significantly. They like to talk about long range, but it really isn't.
Meshtastic doesn't really do intelligent routing, so it's not great as a single large public net.
Meshtastic has a lot of little features like telemetry and such which are half-baked and broadcast on the Primary "channel." Settings to send automatic or telemetry data over secondary channels is absent in the very half-baked software are of course missing.
It's less secure than shouting in the street. Looking at the design of the thing, it looks like it's a man-in-the-middle attack that's had a chat app built around it.
And you're not going to get normies to adopt it. It's a garbagefuck user unfriendly chat app that you need to spend $50 on a little radio to even use, to talk to...nobody. I've seen the idea of "Let's use it to communicate during our hike!" I can think of fewer practical ways to do that, because now you have to have the Meshtastic node and a phone with you, if one or the other battery dies you're fucked, and it's possible you'd be out of radio range of your partners before you're out of shouting range. Somebody's gonna walk out into the woods with a meshtastic node, fall into a hole and their body will never be found.
Idk with the mountainous terrain of my state its fine. It covers the entire city with all the relays we have and they are solar powered. I will say you are right about the security. Its literally only safe because no one knows about it.
I live in an East coast pine forest where the average urethra has longer range than sub-watt UHF. What range testing I've done with the two nodes I own shows I can get about 3 blocks with one of my nodes on my roof. Around here, you'd need adoption at a truly impossible scale to get any use out of LoRa as an infrastructure protocol.
I know of three projects that use LoRa as the carrier technology: Meshtastic, Meshcore and even Reticulum (which isn't strictly LoRa but I've seen it extended across LoRa). Meshtastic is probably the worst, and most popular, of the lot.
We really fucked up letting corporations control the internet.
Meshtastic is fine for a small network but people are using it with the intention of building a city-wide mesh network and it's failing miserably. There would have to be big changes in Meshtastic before it's viable in such an environment. Meshcore however seems to show promise. The only downside being the need for repeater nodes since clients don't repeat. I'm seeing a little adoption of Meshcore locally.
There are attempts to make state-wide meshes, there's one in North Carolina. Most of the traffic on this mesh? "Morning mesh!" --no answer-- Most of the conversations you see between members? On Discord. Probably because Discord actually works.
I dig the idea of a communication network in which individuals can own the infrastructure. This doesn't seem to be it, though.