I'm reading 5% on a quick search. Isn't that an unsurprising conversion rate for a successful app with a free tier? Why would it increase further in ChatGPT's case, other than by losing non-paying customers?
Huge fan of Reticulum, fixes some of my biggest gripes with Meshtastic. Shame it hasn't got as much adoption yet. For those looking for Meshtastic-equivalent things in the Reticulum ecosystem:
Didn't got adoption because the code base is awful to work with and there is a trauma against bluetooth being used as a network path.
Plus: encryption is heavy when bandwidth is limited and over radio waves we aren't even permitted to encrypt data most of the times.
Please don't read my comment as bringing down the project. I'm a fan, used everything it was produced but ultimately is unusable for serious applications on the current state. I really tried hard to adopt it.
If the reticulum code is worse than the meshtastic one, then it is truly atrocious. Been trying to get a specific board to simply "sleep" its radio using meshtastic, and nobody seems to know WHY it doesnt do it. The code is horrible spaghetti with lots of ifdefs. And nobody seems to know why things are the way they are in the code re: power handling. ChatGPT wrote me a brute force method that works, but its ugly and I dont want to maintain patches.
But it is fairly easy to hack on. I have no idea how to debug things without USB serial connected, though.
Sorry, can't really compare because I've never had to suffer looking at meshtastic source code. Quite tempted at this point to just throw the python implementation of reticulum at Claude and see if a validated port to C++ is possible.
Maybe a bit offtopic and not LoRa, but I've been looking at ESP32 and they include an ESPMesh for the WiFi radio with a promise of about 500 to 1000 meters range from what I read. It isn't the same range as LoRa, but it is "larger" bandwidth and for the price of 3 dollars per unit seems promising on urban areas to connect people. I'm trying it out now.
What are those gripes? If I don't have anyone else who would use it, but would hang out in a public chat room, it didn't seem like reticulum was the right choice for that? You need destinations on things?
It seems like big cities get congested, on marginal systems the chances of only getting half the messages is very high. It really dosnt integrate with much else, the mqtt stuff seems unreliable.
It does seem like the RNode radios are a lot less mature but they seem to be aiming to be less of a toy.
Nomadnet it's really bad; it doesn't properly work with a 80x24 terminal and 16 colors.
Also, it uses tons of CPU on legacy machines. It needs some rework.
Not everyone it's a hipster with 256 or 32 bit colour terminals, shitty NerdFonts (nonstandards) and big displays.
And being written in Python3 makes it dog slow. Being rewritten in Go would get a few performance tweaks, (networking and GC there it's ideal), security and portability. But, please, no BubbleTea unless you can be sure it can work on a plain XTerm with 16 colors (I use Tango for readability, but 16 colors FFS). Keep 256 colours as an option.
One of the main differences with MeshCore is that client nodes don't repeat messages, only dedicated repeater nodes repeat with the idea that they should be placed in more ideal locations.
Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.
> Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.
Thats not the problem. And Ive also mentioned Meshcore as well on their discord with no threats of banning or anything of the sort. Ive also seen people come in the group, with "Meshtastic sucks and Meshcore is best", and the worst by admins was 'we have no problem discussing but that tone was overly harsh'.
Liam Kottle, the head of Meshcore ran the first Meshtastic map from grabbed MQTT data. However, he was grabbing and saving everything, including public channels, direct messages, GPS, telemetry. Everything. 1.5y ago, people were going to his map and snooping on Defcon Meshtastic DM's, since even 1 node who reported MQTT would send everything. And then, DMs were simply filtered by the UI, but were effectively encrypted by the same shared key.
Normally there was a general expectation that the data was ephemeral. Liam basically created and caused this data problem by saving and making available everything sent to MQTT.
Meshtastic devs ended up having to tighten down the public MQTT broker a bunch. They also made the client on phones be more restrictive what was done and sent to MQTT. Also made "OK to forward MQTT" flag in the data packets too. And 2.5 introduced PKI TOFU for direct messages to prevent leakage.
Aside the personnel difficulties, the technical issues with Meshcore are similar at node capacity too. Messages still dont get delivered near capacity. Core requires infrastructure nodes. Its more like APRS+LoRa than anything like a mesh.
It's unfair to assign that much blame to assign to any one person. I think it's more fair to say that the Meshtastic community as a whole has a problem with people making overly-narrow assumptions about the goals and what use cases Meshtastic is intended for, suitable for, or usable for. As a result, the community was able to do a lot of development work seemingly without considering that there could even be privacy concerns. And then they had to scramble to retrofit a lot of privacy controls that would have been obvious requirements all along to people coming at the project with a different mindset.
Some people want Meshtastic to be rock-solid communication infrastructure for use in a doomsday or disaster scenario. Some people want to use it to undermine the importance of cellular communications networks. Some people want it to be used much like CB radio as a local public conversation channel. Some people envision it used mostly with stationary transmitters, while other people want to use it entirely with mobile nodes. I use it primarily for group location sharing (many to many), since the location sharing capabilities Apple and Google provide for their smartphone platforms only easily support one-to-one or one-to-several location sharing.
It seems that at scale meshcore is much better. The more nodes you get, the worst it gets with Meshtastic after a certain point. For meshcore you now have entire regions connected in a single mesh with hundreds of nodes.
Agreed. Ran the comms for my burning man camp and everyone kept getting confused with the channels mess among other usability issues. I like where Mesh core is going, just wish the repeater nodes could run on gateway hardware so they don’t become the choke point with a half-duplex radio (bs like 8 full duplex channels on the RAK wireless gateway)
Meshtastic: Text message mesh network using LoRa modems.
Reticulum: full network stack (alternative to IP), mesh, focus on low-speed, unreliable connections. Transport layer agnostic. Current 'Hardware drivers' are written for LoRa, Internet Tunnels, Wifi, Amateur radio.
Reticulum sounds great? It is, but still has 2 problems: 1. The only complete & stable implementation is written in Python and 2. The existing end-user applications have confusing and complex UIs (except for the command-line tools for remote shell and file copy).
First I've heard of this. My initial reaction is why oh god why this name. I liked Anathem, but seriously you're not going to using this as the Internet 3000 years from now.
Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.
I mean this is like comment and comment reply number three of the same pattern: "I have Tesla Model 3|Y and it's doing well" --> "sample size of 1 mreh".
Reviews tend to skew negative. Where are all the angry Tesla owners here? (Seriously. I want to hear from angry HN readers about bad 3|Y ownership experience.)
I have a Y and an S (Palladium) and the Y is solid (only service for usual EV wear items) but the S has been... a "luxury" vehicle let's say that. I'd imagine some of the issues it had in its history wouldn't pass German TUV, but I got the things I noticed fixed under warranty.
I'm really curious how the newer vehicles do. It's a bit of a running joke "the new ones will be better!" but I really do see the improvement in my 2023 Y versus the 2020 3 I had. The S falls somewhere in between in a way that makes sense given its price point and year.
> Anecdotes may be real or fictional; the anecdotal digression is a common feature of literary works and even oral anecdotes typically involve subtle exaggeration and dramatic shape designed to entertain the listener.
Losing audio in front of a certain house may be related to devices I’ve noticed my own neighbors beginning to use, which are those high pitched audio emitters that ward off voles etc. We don’t have that issue in our neighborhood and especially in front yards so I suspect it’s to keep dogs from pausing in their yard.
In any case it’s a periodic high pitched burst. I wonder if that was what caused your issue with the phonaks. Seems like it would be a rather common issue in suburbs that should be considered in hearing aid design.
Yeah in the documentary “supersize me” the subject says, while he ate 30 days straight of McDonald’s, that the restaurant considered a person who ate there once a week to be a heavy consumer.
Is JS dev really still so mercurial as it was 5 to 10 years ago? I'm not so sure. Back then, there would be a new topic daily about some new JS framework etc etc.
I still occasionally see a blip of activity but I can't say it's anything like what we witnessed in the past.
Though I will agree that gen AI trends feel reminiscent of that period of JS dev history.
I’m working on a couple apps using Typescript and for me (ex-JS hacker coming back to it after some years) it’s still an insane menu of bad choices and new “better” frameworks, some of which are abandoned before you get done reading the docs. Though I get that it probably moved faster a few years ago.
I settled on what seemed like the most “standard” set of things (marketable skills blabla) and every week I read an article about how that stack is dead, and everybody supposedly uses FancyStack now.
Adding insult to injury, I have relearned the fine art of inline styles. I assume table layouts are next.
To lurch back on topic: I’m doing this for AI-related stuff and yes, the AI pace of change is much worse, but they sure do make a nice feedback loop.
If it is, it’s entirely self inflicted today. There’s some tentpole tech that is reliable enough to stick with and get things done. Has been for a while.
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