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stavros 6 days ago

It very much doesn't. The FindMy network just scans for BT beacons around, and reports what it sees to Apple's servers via the cellular network. It very much doesn't do mesh networking at all.

msgodel 6 days ago | parent [-]

The missing piece might be thinking of these mesh networks as a new "tier 4" network and routing to the larger internet as quickly as possible.

One huge advantage of this (beyond better networking) would be that apps could use existing IP APIs which would help abstract away vendor/implementation specific problems and improve adoption.

Note that this doesn't necessarily depend on a tier 3 network so you could still accomplish your goals. The internet already has enough features to support partitions and local discovery.

You of course still have to have fixed administrative domains but in reality you always do. Someone takes initiative and sets up the group chat/gets their friends into it. I think if you're willing to mentally separate the network topology from the administrative topology this could be solved.

Of course that's really boring. It's just MDNS and ad-hoc Wifi plus some routing. Everything is pretty much already there (although iOS probably won't let you do it, as usual.)