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A few weeks ago a friend introduced me to a mesh networking protocol called Meshtastic, and it's become a new interest of mine.
The website describes it as:
An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices
The basic premise is that you can send short, end-to-end encrypted text messages over the LoRa protocol using commodity hardware that costs as little as $20 USD. Meshtastic radios form a mesh network such that messages can be relayed through other nodes beyond the range of a single radio. You connect your radio to your phone over Bluetooth and use an app to send and receive messages.
This project initially piqued my interest for many of the same reasons that Gemini did; it's a small community built around open-source software and low-tech alternatives to the web. Unlike Gemini though, I thought it might be a cool way to meet folks in my local area. I also like it as a more accessible alternative to HAM radio, since you don't need a license to operate a Meshtastic radio.
My current apartment is actually a fairly ideal place to set up a node; I'm in a tall apartment complex on top of a hill, with good sight lines in all directions. I'm only a few miles from downtown, so if there are other nodes in my city, I should be able to pick them up. And I have! I've picked up dozens of nodes from up to several miles away.
All that being the case, over the past few weeks, I've only managed to have one real back-and-forth conversation. There aren't enough nodes in my city to form a proper mesh, so I've only really been able to communicate with nodes in the immediate range of mine.
Nodes also aren't online all the time, nodes aren't always in the same place, and folks aren't always standing by their nodes ready to respond to messages.
The protocol allows you to connect meshes that are out of LoRa range of each other by tunneling traffic over the internet using the MQTT protocol. I set up an MQTT broker on my VPS, thinking I could get Meshtastic users in my local area to use it so we can actually communicate. But I'm kinda wondering what the point is—if we're just going to tunnel messages over the internet anyways, what's the point of having these finicky radios?
I think this is a neat project, and I would love to see it grow, but I think this is going to be a short-lived hobby for me. Since I already have the hardware, I'll probably keep my node running to help build out the mesh for other folks, but I think I'm done sitting by my phone waiting to pick up messages.
Still, if any of y'all are interested in Meshtastic, it's a very cheap and easy hobby to get into. I'm told there are other cities with a lot more users, so you might have better luck than I did.
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