If you're interested in Meshtastic, just try Meshcore instead. It's the natural hobbiest progression. Eventually you'll get tired of Meshtastic being nothing but telemetry from unknown nodes, nobody talks, it's a ghost town of weak links. Meshcore on the other hand has people actually having conversations, networks that span whole states, and diagnostic tools that actually work and are informative for describing the network around you.
I don't think this is quite accurate advice. Go where the activity is. Around me, in a city of ~1.5M, the Meshtastic community is quite active. They've worked with local ham radio clubs. They have members setting up a larger mesh that stretches the state from north to south. Meshcore isn't as active, although people are experimenting with it just like Meshtastic. But because Meshtastic has more local users, that's what I would recommend to people here. Meanwhile, places like the PNW and Boston have adopted Meshcore. So I might recommend new users there to try Meshcore. It's okay to have both.
This us vs them/there must be a winner attitude that I see in both communities is really toxic and unnecessary. Look at ham radio: some people use CW, some people use SSB, some people use SSTV, some people use FT8 (but not everyone! There are still hams using other digital modes), many operators dabble in a mix of the above. There are a variety of options and nobody is pressuring other operators to use a particular mode or band.
* MeshCore has a lot more reach than Meshtastic. Often 100+ kilometers compared to just a few kilometers. Even if MT is more popular in your area, there's a good chance that MC will give you far more actual range.
* The online node maps for both are unreliable. I don't recommend relying on them for anything.
* Meshtastic uses a basic flood algorithm, up to 3 hops by default and with a hard limit of 7. Every device works as a repeater.
* MeshCore distinguishes between Companions and Repeaters. It uses flood routing by default, and attempts to establish smarter direct routes where possible. Companions are end-user devices for sending and receiving messages. Repeaters are ideally mounted high up in a static location, and they forward packets they receive. Companions normally don't act as repeaters, but can do so if needed in off-grid situations using the "off-grid repeat" setting.
* Some are concerned about whether MeshCore is open-source. The firmware contains everything important, and is fully open-source. The official companion client app is closed-source freemium. But it's simply a GUI that talks to an API over Bluetooth, TCP, or Serial. The official CLI client is open-source, and you can use any client app you want, including the popular MeshCore-open app.
Maybe it depends? In my city, the online map shows only 2 Meshcore nodes, while Meshtastic 36 nodes.
And I've never spent time learning about it, but I'm under the impression Meshtastic is all about open-source and closer to ham radio philosophy, while Meshcore is backed by some for-profit organization?
Meshcore is MIT licensed open source firmware. There are both open source and closed source client softwares. You get to choose which you support. I think that's where the confusion comes in. It's no more for-profit than Meshtastic, which gets revenue from partnerships with hardware vendors
true, that tends to happen when there's a better but lesser known choice for most applications; one feels motivated to share. To each their own though, there's all kinds out here. Some people like linux, some people like windows, some like to do both
Good to know. I had been teetering on picking this stuff up for a month or so. Now that I know it is yet another tech nerd thing that has an Us vs Them zealotry (or Pepsi Taste Loyalty Test), I'm sold. If I profile as iPhone, Playstation, ReplayTV over TiVo, Sega over NES, C64, videodisc over cassette (I blame my dad for that) which side should I choose? Does either one have better quality zealots (I want to be on the other side)?
It's because we've tried Meshtastic and MeshCore. Look at where the bytes go in the network. Meshtastic it's usually under 5% of traffic is text and for MeshCore it's over 50%. If you want to communicate MeshCore is designed to do that.
It totally is a real project. Their marketing guy tried to take off with the trademark, long story. He's the vibe coder, and is trying to carry on like it's all good while the community went with the actual firmware/client devs.
I'd argue at this point there's more MeshCore networks in the world than Meshtastic
I think this varies greatly by industry (maybe what I'm talking about is 20 years outdated). I know quite a few boomers who worked on their Masters / PhD while raising kids and working. From what I've been told it's because their careers were limited by their existing level of education. For example, most K-12 teachers get a pay boost by completing their Masters.
My career is software dev adjacent and I haven't seen college being a limiting factor.
I'm not entirely sure if CGN will provide some legal protection for pirates but it might make it harder to pirate content as you cannot open ports on CGN meaning BitTorrent will have less seeds which slows downloads. Afaik, IPv6 will make piracy extremely easy as UPnP won't be a requirement. Want to share a file with some friends? You can quickly spin up a web server, send them the URL and it'll just work.
I think you are missing a lot. For instance, I have IPv6 set up at home, at work and at some homes of friends and family. I have firewall rules setup such that traffic from subnets I know is generally allowed instead of allowing access to a single port for the general internet. I also have DNS set up with names like computername.sitename.mydomain.tld
That allows me and the people I know to connect to each other's machines in a way that wouldn't be possible with IPv4 and NAT. I can be at my brothers and type \\[fqdn] in explorer and it will just work. To me, that is the way the internet was meant to function from the beginning.
If you're able to configure firewall rules, you're well outside of any normal users able to make up a significant amount of P2P traffic. And to most users, port forwarding and configuring a firewall rule are nearly identical.
Truth is that for most users, NAT today is almost always synonymous with a firewall that has deny in, allow out policy.
10+ years ago, a lot of folks often connected their machines to the Internet in the way you specified. You could go around scanning people's systems, viewing their fileshares and so on. NAT "fixed" a lot of that.
First off, good luck trying to implement any kind of decentralized network service when almost nobody has a globally routable address.
Second, if ISPs are willing to keep records of IP-address-to-customer mappings, it's not much of a stretch to add TCP/UDP ports to those records as well.
