Alright, I've been out of the loop. Can someone catch me up on meshtastic vs meshcore.
Assume that I have no users of either in my area, which makes more sense for me to start bootstrapping?
Anything else I need to know?
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@enot Neat!
I assume you chose to use meshcore for particular reasons. I'd love to know what that reasoning was, and what your experience has been like so far.
@ajroach42 A few reasons for sure.
First I did try meshtastic which had a fair amount of adoption in my city. I got all these nodes showing up and couldn't talk to anyone.
I tested it with my own devices between home and out wandering, then found meshcore and tried that. I had better success even with my hyper local tests with meshcore.
@ajroach42 However I was all alone. No meshcore in Canada as far as I could find. However Seattle had started a network and I'm across the water. So I stuck a repeater on a hill and managed to join them over 100km away. Messages were not always getting through but around 80% so I stayed with meshcore.
@ajroach42@retro.social if we're assuming you have no existing users in your area, look into reticulum instead.
with reticulum, instead of being a big-ideas community project that never quite delivers on its promises (and frequently delivers AI slop) which is what you'll find with both of the options you mentioned, you will have a complete standalone secure ecosystem that is done, does everything it claims to exactly as it claims to, can be maintained and updated and added to and ported to new devices by one reasonably knowledgeable person, and whose maintainer retired essentially because it reached feature-completion
with reticulum, instead of being a big-ideas community project that never quite delivers on its promises (and frequently delivers AI slop) which is what you'll find with both of the options you mentioned, you will have a complete standalone secure ecosystem that is done, does everything it claims to exactly as it claims to, can be maintained and updated and added to and ported to new devices by one reasonably knowledgeable person, and whose maintainer retired essentially because it reached feature-completion
@linear I've been looking at Reticulum (and talking about it) and I haven't heard much from users.
If you've got experience with reticulum, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.
I think Meshtastic is likely the easier one to get others using. Meshcore is better designed to deal with busy meshes, but on the other hand, if you want to use it on a stand-alone device, you must purchase a license to use the firmware. (it's free for devices you tether to a phone or whatever)
If you're in a rural area that's never going to be terribly saturated with mesh traffic, Meshtastic is likely just fine.
@cordelya They charge for standalone devices? That's bullshit.
@cordelya @ajroach42 I don’t know the details, but meshcore had a bit of an internal rift, possibly over this issue, I think most of the community is using this fork: https://meshcore.io/
@cordelya Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it was a bullshit claim. I meant that it's bullshit for them to do it.
That is not how you grow a network.
@ajroach42 I read what you intended the first time.. just was dropping in the citation in case anybody else wanted to see. ❤️
