alt Hacker NewsI'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.
Replies
How cute that you’re “puzzled”. Cool story bro.
Have YOU ever tried interacting with the developers? No?
* They made incredibly poorly designed software — the firmware and the mobile apps — and then yell at you for “using it wrong” * The refuse to admit they made a mistake with the 7 hop limit and call you an idiot for not believing in their garbage “simulator” * They write nasty responses to app reviews and GitHub issues because they’re petulant children. Just go read the responses, and look at the hissyfit the of the primary app developer in discord. * They’ve taken down multiple community groups because they decided they needed to be a business rather than an open-source project. Seriously just go look at the history in their discord #trademark channel. They’re on the verge of evil.
All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
As I understand it, the section on "what not to do" features many things that Meshtastic does, though it does not say that explicitly. Perhaps the linked post wasn't clear to non hams (it is a newsletter targeted at hams), but the biggest issue is not flood routing, but using the same channel for networking and user access. It, by definition, cannot scale meaningfully. Many commercial networks solve this with either FDMA or TDMA.
Elsewhere in the newsletter, the author advocates for a form of FDMA, where users operate on different, dynamically allocated frequencies and all of them are received at once. P25 trunked radios used by almost all law enforcement in the US operate on a system like this.
I think the vitriol from those who are in the space either professionally or as an amateur comes from the fact Meshtastic is repeating mistakes we knew about in the 80s at the latest, for which reams if literature freely exists.