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10 days agoWe’ve had a pretty active mesh where I’m from but I see this very similarly to ham radios. They are great for specific scenarios but not terribly useful in everyday life. I still have my meshtastic node powered on but I rarely connect my phone to it to check things. When I do, there aren’t that many nodes that are active.
Overally, I’d say it’s great if you can afford cheap hardware and/or want to build but you aren’t going to get much daily use out of it.
Our meshtastic network was pretty robust at one point. It hurts that I’m not at a good point geographically, as well. I have a massive ridge between me and most of the network. That also made technician-level ham pretty pointless from home. At one point, about 3/4 of our messages on our mesh was just people in aircraft overhead. I know we are flyover but it was very demoralizing.