[HN Gopher] Meshtastic
___________________________________________________________________
Meshtastic
Author : debo_
Score : 274 points
Date : 2025-11-30 01:15 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meshtastic.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (meshtastic.org)
| mertleee wrote:
| This community is laughably caustic and abusive. My friend
| attempted to create a simple tutorial site and their org harassed
| him for over a year. He didn't even mention the word "meshtastic"
| and they made dozens of false trademark claims that his site
| could be "confused" with an official site.
|
| I was previously a fan, but I'd never seen behavior like that
| from an "open source" project.
| bb88 wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that it's not even a very good
| mesh network.
|
| There's a Zero Retries article recently with a critical review
| of meshtastic. Or find my comments on meshtastic here.
|
| If anything they showed there's demand for a public mesh.
| Unfortunately, they didn't want to learn from AlohaNet or any
| of the other meshes.
| swaits wrote:
| You're understating it. Meshtastic is horribly designed. If
| you designed a wireless mesh network making all the worst
| possible choices, with the most shortsighted design decisions
| imaginable, you'd get something a little better than
| Meshtastic.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > There's a Zero Retries article recently with a critical
| review of meshtastic
|
| Do you have a link? I went through recent ZT issues and
| didn't find what you're referring to
| kop316 wrote:
| Heh, that isn't my experience.
|
| I created a client Linux: https://gitlab.com/kop316/gtk-
| meshtastic-client and even posted it on their discussion page:
| https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/99 . One of the
| maintainers responded positively to me:
| https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/99#discussion...
| .
| sandos wrote:
| I have not seen that at all. Honestly, people are almost too
| welcoming and also maybe even too accepting of PRs for example.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Popular in:
|
| 2024 (335 points, 79 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448
|
| 2022 (249 points, 90 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142
|
| 2020 (620 points, 168 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066
| tomhow wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Meshtastic 's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242091 - Aug 2024 (16
| comments)
|
| _Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh
| network_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448 - Jan
| 2024 (78 comments)
|
| _Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform for the
| Lora RF protocol_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142 - July 2022 (88
| comments)
|
| _We 're making an open-source $30 GPS/mesh radio, would like
| advice_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066 - March
| 2020 (166 comments)
| scirob wrote:
| Yea ppl know it but why not post again a very fun open project.
|
| Here is part of the Berlin mesh https://potatomesh.net/
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Wow Freifunk on the Teufelsberg, what a great twist of faith or
| whatshouldicallit :D
| cheschire wrote:
| Alternatively...
|
| https://reticulum.network/
| 0x62 wrote:
| Huge fan of Reticulum, fixes some of my biggest gripes with
| Meshtastic. Shame it hasn't got as much adoption yet. For those
| looking for Meshtastic-equivalent things in the Reticulum
| ecosystem:
|
| - Sideband: iOS/Android chat app
| (https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband)
|
| - NomadNet: Desktop CLI chat app
| (https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet)
|
| - Rnode: Reference node hardware/firmware
| (https://unsigned.io/rnode/)
| maccam912 wrote:
| What are those gripes? If I don't have anyone else who would
| use it, but would hang out in a public chat room, it didn't
| seem like reticulum was the right choice for that? You need
| destinations on things?
| bb88 wrote:
| We have a relatively dense meshtastic in my city, and yet I
| can't reliably send a message across to my friend, who
| would be 4 hops away.
|
| It's just not awesome. Especially compared to what you can
| do with ham radio.
| iberator wrote:
| You must live in nyc or san Francisco lol
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| It's pretty dense in Portland and Seattle too, I'd image
| most of the bigger cities have a fairly large net
| bb88 wrote:
| Boise, actually.
| PBnFlash wrote:
| It seems like big cities get congested, on marginal systems
| the chances of only getting half the messages is very high.
| It really dosnt integrate with much else, the mqtt stuff
| seems unreliable.
|
| It does seem like the RNode radios are a lot less mature
| but they seem to be aiming to be less of a toy.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Didn't got adoption because the code base is awful to work
| with and there is a trauma against bluetooth being used as a
| network path.
|
| Plus: encryption is heavy when bandwidth is limited and over
| radio waves we aren't even permitted to encrypt data most of
| the times.
|
| Please don't read my comment as bringing down the project.
| I'm a fan, used everything it was produced but ultimately is
| unusable for serious applications on the current state. I
| really tried hard to adopt it.
| sandos wrote:
| If the reticulum code is worse than the meshtastic one,
| then it is truly atrocious. Been trying to get a specific
| board to simply "sleep" its radio using meshtastic, and
| nobody seems to know WHY it doesnt do it. The code is
| horrible spaghetti with lots of ifdefs. And nobody seems to
| know why things are the way they are in the code re: power
| handling. ChatGPT wrote me a brute force method that works,
| but its ugly and I dont want to maintain patches.
|
| But it is fairly easy to hack on. I have no idea how to
| debug things without USB serial connected, though.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Sorry, can't really compare because I've never had to
| suffer looking at meshtastic source code. Quite tempted
| at this point to just throw the python implementation of
| reticulum at Claude and see if a validated port to C++ is
| possible.
|
| Maybe a bit offtopic and not LoRa, but I've been looking
| at ESP32 and they include an ESPMesh for the WiFi radio
| with a promise of about 500 to 1000 meters range from
| what I read. It isn't the same range as LoRa, but it is
| "larger" bandwidth and for the price of 3 dollars per
| unit seems promising on urban areas to connect people.
| I'm trying it out now.
| anthk wrote:
| Nomadnet it's really bad; it doesn't properly work with a
| 80x24 terminal and 16 colors.
|
| Also, it uses tons of CPU on legacy machines. It needs some
| rework. Not everyone it's a hipster with 256 or 32 bit colour
| terminals, shitty NerdFonts (nonstandards) and big displays.
|
| And being written in Python3 makes it dog slow. Being
| rewritten in Go would get a few performance tweaks,
| (networking and GC there it's ideal), security and
| portability. But, please, no BubbleTea _unless_ you can be
| sure it can work on a plain XTerm with 16 colors (I use Tango
| for readability, but 16 colors FFS). Keep 256 colours as an
| _option_.
| greesil wrote:
| First I've heard of this. My initial reaction is why oh god why
| this name. I liked Anathem, but seriously you're not going to
| using this as the Internet 3000 years from now.
|
| Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer
| could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| Meshcore is another alternative. I haven't done a deep dive
| into either but have heard that they both fix some Meshtastic
| issues.
|
| https://meshcore.co.uk/
| izme wrote:
| One of the main differences with MeshCore is that client
| nodes don't repeat messages, only dedicated repeater nodes
| repeat with the idea that they should be placed in more ideal
| locations.
|
| Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or
| they'll kickban you.
| sschueller wrote:
| Sad to see open source communities being so insecure that
| they feel threatened by an alternative project. Both can
| coexist and competition is good.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| The Meshtastic community is almost as toxic as the ham
| radio one.
| mystraline wrote:
| > Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic,
| or they'll kickban you.
|
| Thats not the problem. And Ive also mentioned Meshcore as
| well on their discord with no threats of banning or
| anything of the sort. Ive also seen people come in the
| group, with "Meshtastic sucks and Meshcore is best", and
| the worst by admins was 'we have no problem discussing but
| that tone was overly harsh'.
|
| Liam Kottle, the head of Meshcore ran the first Meshtastic
| map from grabbed MQTT data. However, he was grabbing and
| saving everything, including public channels, direct
| messages, GPS, telemetry. Everything. 1.5y ago, people were
| going to his map and snooping on Defcon Meshtastic DM's,
| since even 1 node who reported MQTT would send everything.
| And then, DMs were simply filtered by the UI, but were
| effectively encrypted by the same shared key.
|
| Normally there was a general expectation that the data was
| ephemeral. Liam basically created and caused this data
| problem by saving and making available everything sent to
| MQTT.
|
| Meshtastic devs ended up having to tighten down the public
| MQTT broker a bunch. They also made the client on phones be
| more restrictive what was done and sent to MQTT. Also made
| "OK to forward MQTT" flag in the data packets too. And 2.5
| introduced PKI TOFU for direct messages to prevent leakage.
|
| Aside the personnel difficulties, the technical issues with
| Meshcore are similar at node capacity too. Messages still
| dont get delivered near capacity. Core requires
| infrastructure nodes. Its more like APRS+LoRa than anything
| like a mesh.
| jeromegv wrote:
| It seems that at scale meshcore is much better. The more
| nodes you get, the worst it gets with Meshtastic after a
| certain point. For meshcore you now have entire regions
| connected in a single mesh with hundreds of nodes.
| wtallis wrote:
| It's unfair to assign that much blame to assign to any
| one person. I think it's more fair to say that the
| Meshtastic community as a whole has a problem with people
| making overly-narrow assumptions about the goals and what
| use cases Meshtastic is intended for, suitable for, or
| usable for. As a result, the community was able to do a
| lot of development work seemingly without considering
| that there could even _be_ privacy concerns. And then
| they had to scramble to retrofit a lot of privacy
| controls that would have been obvious requirements all
| along to people coming at the project with a different
| mindset.
|
| Some people want Meshtastic to be rock-solid
| communication infrastructure for use in a doomsday or
| disaster scenario. Some people want to use it to
| undermine the importance of cellular communications
| networks. Some people want it to be used much like CB
| radio as a local public conversation channel. Some people
| envision it used mostly with stationary transmitters,
| while other people want to use it entirely with mobile
| nodes. I use it primarily for group location sharing
| (many to many), since the location sharing capabilities
| Apple and Google provide for their smartphone platforms
| only easily support one-to-one or one-to-several location
| sharing.
| rfmoz wrote:
| MeshCore app is way better than the Meshtastic one.
| ENadyr wrote:
| Agreed. Ran the comms for my burning man camp and
| everyone kept getting confused with the channels mess
| among other usability issues. I like where Mesh core is
| going, just wish the repeater nodes could run on gateway
| hardware so they don't become the choke point with a
| half-duplex radio (bs like 8 full duplex channels on the
| RAK wireless gateway)
| snickerer wrote:
| Meshtastic: Text message mesh network using LoRa modems.
|
| Reticulum: full network stack (alternative to IP), mesh, focus
| on low-speed, unreliable connections. Transport layer agnostic.
| Current 'Hardware drivers' are written for LoRa, Internet
| Tunnels, Wifi, Amateur radio.
|
| Reticulum sounds great? It is, but still has 2 problems: 1. The
| only complete & stable implementation is written in Python and
| 2. The existing end-user applications have confusing and
| complex UIs (except for the command-line tools for remote shell
| and file copy).
| nunobrito wrote:
| Exactly my thoughts. Reticulum feels like an eternal "one day
| will be great" project but we keep waiting and waiting.
| anthk wrote:
| Reticulum and Nomadnet should have been rewritten in Golang
| long ago.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm curious, what issues is python causing them?
| anthk wrote:
| Slow speed and CPU hogs on legacy machines such as ATOM
| n270 netbooks.
| sandos wrote:
| After playing with meshtastic and seeing some packet-loss
| stats for LoRa in general, I would never even try reticulum.
| Sounds very, very painful.
| curcbit wrote:
| reticulum cannot scale, it's not topology aware and has no
| congestion management
| angiolillo wrote:
| I have a few LoRa radios running Meshtastic and they're fun to
| play with, but I wouldn't rely on them in a critical situation.
| It's too easy to accidentally configure a node incorrectly and
| cause problems for nearby nodes.
|
| Perhaps someday the project will settle on a handful of sensible
| presets for different use cases. Even better would be if more of
| the options were managed dynamically by the software itself,
| things like adjusting timeouts and hops based on current network
| utilization and previous transmission success rate, or
| automatically tweaking the role based on the current mesh
| toplolgy, that sort of thing.
| tguvot wrote:
| regional meshes may have suggested configuration. for example
| bay area mesh https://bayme.sh/docs/getting-
| started/recommended-settings/
|
| i installed a node week ago. honestly, it is somewhat
| underwhelming
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| If you're underwhelmed (in the Bay Area?) imagine how
| underwhelming it has been in Omaha, Nebraska, ha ha.
|
| I played a bit with them. There was one node anyway about 6
| miles from me.
| tguvot wrote:
| did you get omaha steaks ads over meshtastic ?
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| We need better radio silicon that can survey a wide swath of
| available spectrum (based on country limits) and pick
| channel(s) appropriate to the use optimized for battery life,
| distance, and/or bandwidth with a simplified interface. There's
| no sense wasting spectrum or having malfunctioning radio gear
| when it can be standardized and used more efficiently without
| an artificial, protectionist, hoarding monopoly (excluding
| particular essential, prioritized uses).
|
| Proprietary mesh networks tend to become unusable garbage
| because they omit DoS, rate limits, and proper configuration
| for dense metropolitan uses, and tend to fail at investing in
| upkeep.
| angiolillo wrote:
| > better radio silicon that can survey a wide swath of
| available spectrum (based on country limits) and pick
| channel(s) appropriate to the use optimized for battery life,
| distance, and/or bandwidth
|
| That would certainly be helpful, but even with current radios
| I can imagine a configuration process that sequentially scans
| different channels to achieve the same result, just a little
| slower.
| wtallis wrote:
| A full scan would take _hours_. With just the default
| choice of channel width (250 kHz), spreading factor and
| coding rate, in the US you 'd have to listen to 104
| different frequencies, and you'd need to listen for more
| than a minute to get any idea of whether each frequency is
| in use. The newest LoRa chips that support simultaneously
| monitoring multiple spreading factors aren't yet supported
| by Meshtastic or available in cheap devices. The base
| station chips that also support listening to eight
| frequencies at a time are _way_ more expensive.
|
| Even with the latest radios available but not yet used by
| Meshtastic, it would be _very hard_ to implement any kind
| of frequency-hopping scheme or variable bandwidth, without
| requiring mesh nodes to burn a lot more power sending and
| receiving+acknowledging across multiple modem settings to
| maintain reliability. LoRa as implemented by the chips used
| in affordable Meshtastic devices is really more suited to
| operating many small disjoint mesh networks on separate
| channels, not one large mesh network spanning multiple
| frequencies /bandwidths/etc. (Dropping the ad-hoc _mesh_
| aspect in favor of centralized coordination is pretty much
| the only way to scale up to large networks.)
| linsomniac wrote:
| For the last 2-3 years I've been "this close" to getting a few
| devices and setting up a repeater node on my home roof and my
| office roof, and one to play with... I love the idea of bringing
| an alternative to SMS to my area. But at the end of the day, is
| anyone actually using it for anything?
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Some of the official city supported emergency preparedness
| groups use it in my city. I would say it is largely a curiosity
| for me, like ham radio.
|
| Been more fun to take it camping and stuff to play around with
| with friends.
|
| Want to try and send one up in an RC plane soon.
| raudette wrote:
| In my experience, no, but still worth doing.
|
| You end up finding and chatting (often off-mesh!) with people
| who are within Lora-mesh-distance of you, who have similar
| interests.
| meshtasticsuxx wrote:
| Meshtastic is a terrible project with some of the most toxic
| terrible people running it.
|
| If they had any human emotions they would feel shame for how they
| treat the community.
|
| But instead they're tiny corporations cosplaying as human.
|
| Meshtastic
| quapster wrote:
| Meshtastic is interesting because it's basically "LoRa-first
| networking" instead of "internet with some radios attached." Most
| consumer radios are still stuck in the mental model of walkie-
| talkies, while Meshtastic treats RF as an IP-like transport layer
| you can script, automate, and extend. That flips the stack: your
| primary network can be intermittent, off-grid, and low bandwidth,
| and the internet becomes an optional upgrade instead of a
| dependency.
|
| The bigger story is that this is what "local-first" looks like in
| the physical world. Phones are powerful computers that are
| useless as soon as the tower or backhaul goes down; a $20 LoRa
| board suddenly becomes the only reliable "infrastructure" in
| range. Once enough people carry something Meshtastic-compatible,
| you get the weird inversion where the cheapest, dumbest devices
| are the ones that keep working when the expensive, smart ones
| don't.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| And not even the ones who carry them, just a half dozen well-
| placed reliably powered router nodes can massively increase the
| range of the network in general.
|
| You can get plug&play ones from seeedstudio for $100-ish, solar
| panels and batteries included.
| bergie wrote:
| We're using Meshtastic quite extensively for communication on our
| boat. Each crew member carries a mobile waterproof node (Seeed
| T1000e), the boat itself has a node, and we also have a
| Meshtastic tracker for the dinghy.
|
| We often sail in places where there's no communication
| infrastructure, or it is prohibitively expensive. With Meshtastic
| we can talk when somebody goes ashore, and the boat can send
| telemetry and alerts to the remote crew.
|
| Some of our buddy boats also have Meshtastic on board so we can
| text chat with them instead of using VHF.
|
| Here's a story describing this:
| https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-...
| Zenst wrote:
| The only real problem I foresee with this use(fantastic use
| case btw) is if you travel across regions, does the kit
| currently get automatically switched to correct frequencies and
| power limits?
| bergie wrote:
| No, you need to switch the region manually. Not a big deal to
| do for a couple of nodes.
|
| The trickier part is to figure out the correct preset for
| more exotic locations. I've had to ask a couple of times from
| the local Meshtastic community group.
| jonhohle wrote:
| There's no reason this can't be done in software though via
| GPS, right?
| wtallis wrote:
| Many (if not most) Meshtastic devices don't have a GPS
| receiver of their own, and also may not be paired with a
| phone app to supply location. So at least some devices
| would need to sniff GPS coordinates from traffic on the
| _wrong_ band in order to know it 's time to switch to the
| new band appropriate for the new location. Some amount of
| automatic reconfiguration could probably be made to work,
| but there would be serious limitations on how many use
| cases it could handle.
| bergie wrote:
| I think the primary problem is that the polygons for
| regions would take quite a bit of space in the limited
| microcontroller.
|
| Though bigger reason likely is that very few people
| actually travel between different regions
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| This is really cool; it's the merchant marine equivalent of the
| flight park near me which uses meshtastic for glider
| tracking/comms (secondary).
|
| Lots of LoRa stations nearby.
| synergy20 wrote:
| How far can Meshtastic go, it seems using LoRA. How is it
| different from VHF/UHF based radio that can do 30+ miles using
| handheld where no cellular power exists(off-grid communication),
| or the 5-mile walkie-talkie. My assumption is that Meshtastic has
| the advantage of low-power that can sustain much longer time.
|
| Another forthcoming alternative will be satellite-based chat
| using phones.
| exitb wrote:
| Meshtastic is multi-hop, doesn't require a license and is
| encrypted by default. It's also a toy network, really.
| Reliability doesn't seem to be high on the priority list.
| wtallis wrote:
| Reliability carries serious costs in airtime usage and power
| consumption, and there's always going to be someone who
| demands that the network support an even higher level of
| reliability. "Toy network" is highly subjective and depends
| on your (unstated) assumption about what kind of use case you
| want Meshtastic to fulfill.
| bergie wrote:
| For a single hop you can expect close to similar ranges as a
| VHF set. We saw 30NM distances on open sea when leaving
| Curacao. Could be a lot more with antenna situated high up.
|
| Where the magic potentially kicks in is the mesh hops. With
| those you can reach much further by jumping from one node to
| another.
|
| It's not even close to satellite comms in reach or reliability,
| but it also requires no infrastructure, no licensing, and no
| subscriptions.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Seems perfect for AI agents to use to communicate to other nearby
| agents.
|
| I have two of the LilyGo units and want to hook one up to the
| computer and then carry the other one with me.
| wtallis wrote:
| What do you even _mean_ by "AI agent"? I've head that term
| used in a few different ways, but none of them are at all close
| to anything that would benefit from an off-grid ad-hoc dialup-
| speed communication channel between agents (as opposed to
| between an agent an a human or non-AI service).
| raffael_de wrote:
| Is there a mesh network solution with very low bandwidth by
| design? "by design" meaning that participants of the network
| aren't able to increase their bandwidth beyond a defined upper
| limit. I'm thinking of a bandwidth of about 10kbps. The low
| bandwidth would practically eliminate problems around spamming
| and cp. The idea is a network that is only useful for exchanging
| texts/messages and accessing simple text based websites.
| wtallis wrote:
| Meshtastic already fulfills that, except for the bit about
| accessing simple text-based websites, because Meshtastic isn't
| an IP network. The data rates only go up to 21.88 kbps for the
| fastest preset: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-
| settings/#presets
| raffael_de wrote:
| the idea is that there would be no point in visiting anything
| else than text based web-sites or use text-based services. or
| do you mean that it can't be hooked up to the internet due to
| its lack of IP protocol?
| HelloUsername wrote:
| What about Briar / Berty
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.briarproje...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/app/id1535500412
| soldeace wrote:
| My wife and I tried to use Briar to communicate after we had
| been reallocated two seat rows apart in a flight. It didn't
| work at all. Messages arrived hours later, when they arrived.
| aeblyve wrote:
| Meshtastic is reasonably good for unplanned and mobile use cases
| such as hiking, but for building an emplaced network, Meshcore
| has much better performance.
|
| This has been our experience in the Greater Boston Mesh.
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