I've played with MeshCore and Meshtastic a bit, and while they are fun, the general hype seems overblown. The "SHTF" types that get involved with this tend to just taint the whole concept for me. I was/am interested in the use cases for building sensor networks, but most of the chatter seems to be around people who just want to send Hello World type texts back and forth, without realizing how poorly a network like this would perform in a real SHTF scenario.

I feel the same way, and both mobile apps are pretty janky, with Meshtastic being extra obnoxious because the UI teams between Android and Apple apparently don't talk to each other- very hard to onboard/answer questions from someone new if you're on a different platform than them.

It was fun and cheap to set up, but I look forward to something with better messaging persistence so you can at least reliably not miss stuff.

I largely agree and want to add more,I also think the lack of standards also will effect it's usability in a real shtf scenario. why should I use meshstastic over meshcore for example. I also don't think lora will be in my mind in that kind of scenario.

I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS where you walk around a large camp and "capture" different regions. It worked great for that and was a lot of fun.

If there ever where a more serious situation where my life depended on one of these meshes, I would be feeling pretty uneasy. They are absolutely not reliable enough to even consider such a thing. I suppose they might be better than nothing.

To say nothing of what is required to set up the devices. I wanted to put a full dev system on a raspberry pi 3 just so it would all be in one place and I could work on it when in a location with no internet - it ran out of memory trying to compile the massive web app that is the default client interface.

SHTF?