alt Hacker NewsMeshtastic is the most popular in my area. I can see about 150 nodes from my house in a US county of ~300K (though actually being able to talk to most of those remains questionable).
I am certain the popularity of Meshtastic is down to how easy they have made it to onboard. Buy the module, flash using the web flasher, install the app on your phone, done. There's a Youtube tutorial on every street corner for this, even though I (and seemingly many people) don't find Meshtastic to be all that reliable.
For reference, this is what Meshtastic has to say about their flood-based mesh protocol: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/
To be clear, I’m not harshing on Meshtastic’s node counts. In some sense these systems are like packet ham radio. They appeal to a specific user base. I just question how their protocols are going to scale, and even 150 nodes is extremely small compared to the number of people around you who are using the Internet, WiFi, etc.
So, for instance, at the URL you referenced, it says at the bottom:
> As meshes grow larger and traffic becomes more contentious, the firmware will increase these intervals. This is in addition to duty cycle, channel, and air-time utilization throttling.
> Starting with version 2.4.0, the firmware will scale back Telemetry, Position, and other ancillary port traffic for meshes larger than 40 nodes (nodes seen in the past 2 hours) using the following algorithm:
> ScaledInterval = Interval * (1.0 + ((NumberOfOnlineNodes - 40) * 0.075))
> For example an active mesh of 62 nodes would scale back telemetry.device_update_interval to 79.5 minutes instead of the 30 minute default.
It looks like they are already building back-off strategies as the net scales, and that starts to happen at very low node counts (just 40). So, what happens when node counts hit 500 or 1000? Again, not trying to throw stones; just trying to understand how far these protocols can go and how they degrade/fail as they scale. Ideally, they don’t fall over and even possibly get more robust (with more nodes, there are typically more topological connections between nodes, which provides more possible paths and resiliency).