Semperverus

So the radio mesh range depends on a couple factors but the short answer is “yes, easily.”

The long answer is that the world record for longest direct meshtastic/LoRa message is 90km, but you can easily get 1/10th that with some buildings and whatnot blocking the way. Getting really good antennas and sticking a node way up high like in your attic, on your roof, or in a tree and using a personal device closer to the ground that bounces off of it is the most “ideal” scenario for a home setup. I currently talk with people three cities over regularly, and there are about 110 nodes in my area and constantly growing.

Because there are no cellphone towers, you’re kind of responsible for getting your node high up if nobody else has set up a ROUTER node on a nearby mountain (by the way the router role is not the same as your home router, its supposed to be like a cellphone tower but way up on a mountain, not a rooftop of a tall building).

And if you’re the first person in your area, Heltec often sells their chipsets in 2 pack bundles with cases and batteries. Give one to a friend and ask them to pay it forward if they like it!

If you want to get started, you have two basic starter choices: the cheaper Heltec V3 (or now V4) based on ESP32, or the more expensive Heltec T114 based on RAK. The former is more powerful but drains battery like crazy, and the latter is more power efficient but lacks features like Store & Forward. There are other brands of board makers, but Heltec is the entry tier (and both are pretty solid from what I can tell of the two units I have). There is lots of room for DIY builds too if you are looking to do custom shells for on-person devices or enclosures+beefy antennas for outdoor units.

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Weird… You don’t have a .ml domain…

We could just… You know… Stop using smartphones

Oh meshtastic is really cool but even without GPS broadcasting, it is FAR from private. There are some serious flaws with its encryption apparently that the devs don’t want to address, and im like 99% sure you can just be triangulated anyway.

That being said, meshtastic is awesome and everyone should try it. Its a lot of fun and you can “meet” cool people in your community who are kind of makerspace-adjacent and usually kind in general.

Also don’t listen to the meshcore grifters, meshcore is proprietary and requires you to pay for licenses to use its full feature set. They’re like reverse Linux users who just show up whenever meshtastic is mentioned to try to convince you to give your freedoms away.

Those tech giants operate in the EU and have EU customers. 4Chan does neither and stores no user data. At that point the onus is on the user and the UK/EU should be going after their own citizens that use it if they have a problem with it being used. Ideally, they wouldn’t go after anyone but here we are.

I dunno if you know this but SMS support got removed from Signal a few years ago

Its still better than any new chat protocol thats been made in the last decade. You’ll have to pry my family XMPP server out of my cold dead hands.

Well, death makes exceptions for no one, so

They’re retiring or dying of old age soon, they think now’s the time to shit all over the floor and trash the place.

I use it at work when im having a hard time getting started on a project, because I’ll want to yell at it and tell it how its wrong, and how i can do it better.

Great! Now I can listen to my PinePods on my PineBuds which I store in my PinePod that they came with.

Honestly they would have made it a lot farther if they had just shown a fully functional device that could make calls and receive them from deep sleep. All drivers and basic functionality “just working.”

They are fighting an uphill battle against the frustration that was the PinePhone. Nobody wants to buy a flagship-priced brick thats a neat trick for a hobby project.

Meshcore also has a paid license to use the full feature set and if Plex has taught us anything, it’s to stay away from garbage like that. I’ll stick to Meshtastic, thank you.

The fossify apps are legit, I use them daily.

This is the same or similar situation as OpenOffice → LibreOffice or OwnCloud → NextCloud (and to a lesser extent but more similar scenario, Audacity → Tenacity or various other forks).

This is what true open source looks like in action.

People are always angry and confused when i call MIT a grifter license