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Comment by threemux | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Thanks! I appreciate your more accessible explanation.

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