This has been on here a couple of times the past few days or weeks. Finally pulled the trigger and bought a Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro for MeshCore. I find the idea of a para-internet just fast enough for text based monomedia content highly appealing. Probably a mix of nostalgia but also realism - my thinking is that a network too slow for pictures / audio / video would elegantly avoid problems like spam and (illegal) pornography by design.

In Montréal we've rebooted Réseau Libre which used to be a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me. Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app. On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc. and I fear we're wasting time when in the end what wins is controlling the backbone bandwidth, but with the added difficulty of a p2p mesh.

I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.