The firmware on these devices is open source (minus proprietary blobs for ESP32 WiFi, etc.) and the community is active. Check the Meshmap [2] to see some nodes that have made their location public in your area.
I love the project and participate, but people mentioning stuff like this in response to buzzwords irritates me. Like ipfs it is a buzzword-driven curiosity, not a real solution to real problems that anyone has.
Additionally, the meshtastic encryption is a toy. In 2025 when you say encryption you make people think of modern features like replay resistance, perfect forward secrecy, etc. Meshtastic doesn’t do any of this.
IPNS, on the other hand...
In practice, it takes upwards of a whole minute to locate a file it's never seen before, so it's not terribly useful. It's better than nothing, but it's not terribly useful.
It's still cool that someone tried. IPFS is one in a long line of ideas that didn't really work. Occasionally some of these ideas have massive success, like the Internet, and Bitcoin.
So long as you're using the standard long fast and 0/20 frequency slot you'll still have your messages passed via NCMesh nodes even if you're using the broader US Mesh as your MQTT server.
[0] MQTT here simply tunnels the messages over the internet so you get placed in a broader chat room and pseudomesh than you could reach through RF.