logoalt Hacker News

bb88today at 8:11 AM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

wtallistoday at 8:28 AM

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.

show 2 replies
mtlynchtoday at 2:01 PM

I've been spending a lot of time experimenting with and learning about Meshtastic and MeshCore recently,[0] and I'm also puzzled by the criticism of Meshtastic.

In the article you linked, there are three paragraphs about Meshtastic in a 150-paragraph newsletter about several topics. The criticism seems to be that they they use digipeating, and then it refers to a Fedi thread[1] which is more coherent but still fairly vague. The upshot seems to be that flood routing doesn't scale, which is a fair criticism but feels disproportionate to the level of vitriol against the project.

The Fedi thread also adds that the Meshtastic founders were rude or unprofessional to him but doesn't cite any specifics or evidence.

I see this a lot with Meshtastic. People keep saying the founders are toxic and disrespectful of the community but it's always in these vague terms so I don't know what's driving it.

But specifically in this thread, I agree with sibling poster that you're being disrespectful and arguing ineffectively by pointing to such poor resources and then blaming other people for being unconvinced or confused.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/

[1] https://partyon.xyz/@nullagent/113861754522594610

show 2 replies