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.
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).
Even without toxicity, as a domain expert, I'm cynical about community experiments in this space in general.
Hobbyist "mesh networking" communities readily adopt suboptimal modulation, frame specification, packet format, encoding, ineffective mesh arrangements, flood-prone routing mechanisms, poor reference hardware, and bloated user interfaces, while often ignoring basic practices like forward error correction, collision detection/multiplexing, trust mechanisms. Community solutions tend to be opinionated in the worst ways ("we assumed you'd use an arduino" or "here's a mandatory packet header field to indicate whether you're currently in a hot air balloon") and under-constrained in areas where opinion would be helpful "our client UI has 75 configurable options -- get one wrong and you won't be able to communicate."
By the time there is a "community" it's too late to address these issues: network effects have already locked in the worst design decisions.
bb88|2 months ago
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.
wtallis|2 months ago
elevation|2 months ago
Hobbyist "mesh networking" communities readily adopt suboptimal modulation, frame specification, packet format, encoding, ineffective mesh arrangements, flood-prone routing mechanisms, poor reference hardware, and bloated user interfaces, while often ignoring basic practices like forward error correction, collision detection/multiplexing, trust mechanisms. Community solutions tend to be opinionated in the worst ways ("we assumed you'd use an arduino" or "here's a mandatory packet header field to indicate whether you're currently in a hot air balloon") and under-constrained in areas where opinion would be helpful "our client UI has 75 configurable options -- get one wrong and you won't be able to communicate."
By the time there is a "community" it's too late to address these issues: network effects have already locked in the worst design decisions.