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.

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Larrikin 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Is there something preventing people from just setting up both?

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3x35r22m4u an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

	▲	lu5t 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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

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dpedu an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The biggest problem with Meshtastic is that discussions about it inevitably get spammed by Meshcore evangelicals.

	▲	tclancy 14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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)?
	▲	mikeytown2 14 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	lu5t 16 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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