Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

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I'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.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/

[1] https://partyon.xyz/@nullagent/113861754522594610

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.

Thanks! I appreciate your more accessible explanation.

That's a reasonable take to an extent, but underlying all of that is the assumption that Meshtastic should be trying to scale up to support hundreds or thousands of active nodes on a single mesh. Since that's clearly almost impossible to achieve with an ad-hoc network of low-power LoRa radios, it's not entirely fair to criticize Meshtastic for not inventing a revolutionary solution to a very hard problem.

It would be more fair to criticize Meshtastic for not being clear enough about the tradeoffs and limitations inherent in a low-speed ad-hoc mesh network, and for not actively encouraging people to seek other hardware and software if their use cases are not well-matched to what Meshtastic hardware is capable of. A one size fits all solution simply isn't possible, and Meshtastic can't be the right answer for everyone.

This is also a fair response, however I'd argue that the current architecture, far from supporting hundreds or thousands, won't even support dozens in a small area with meaningful traffic being exchanged (e.g., not just heartbeats and routing data). The solutions exist and no revolutionary approach is needed. That's the crux of the complaints.

Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing, but I don't even see a movement to switch over to something more robust.

> Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing,

I'd argue it's everything. A network architecture that requires serious fixed infrastructure should probably be an entirely separate project from the ad-hoc mesh formed solely by cheap battery-powered portable/handheld gadgets. And everyone should be realistic about what "meaningful traffic" is for a network with a default data rate of ~1kbps; it's not reasonable to expect that to support the kind of chatter a busy IRC server would see.

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.

> Have YOU ever tried interacting with the developers? No?

I have. I emailed them a couple of weeks ago and they responded promptly and professionally.

> All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

You want me to read thousands of GitHub issue comments and discord messages in search of bad behavior?

If you have examples of the Meshtastic team behaving badly, why not link to them? The burden of proof is on you, not me.

I don't have a dog in this fight. I think LoRa messaging is neat but I have no investment or relationship with Meshtastic in particular.

Here's an example of an issue they didn't like getting deleted https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/1159

While it looks like Meshtastic devs probably made at least some mistakes relating to that underlying complaint, I think that thread provides thorough evidence that banning that particular user was a reasonable choice.

He went off the rails as a reactionary move is how I see it. He got mad because his issue was deleted. I'm banned from the discord for a disagreement with one of the developers; but I've done code contributions to the project as well.

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