this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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Nice article on Meshtastic. The problem is that, like anything, the actual distance is a lot more dependent on line of sight and the actual mesh existing. Which means we’d need a LOT more people to adopt these and put up repeaters for them to be useful. Which is doable, but not cheap.
At that point, given the extremely small bandwidth, we might as well just use a massive wifi, everyone already has the required hardware for that instead of producing more trash for a pretty much non-existing use case.
Ever since I switched to lemmy, I constantly stumble upon people trying to guilt other people for their hobbies. That's pretty unhealthy.
Whoever reads this, don't feel guilty living your life. Spend time on whatever you're passionate about. Build new things, even if they do not have a rational use case at the moment. They might play an important role in your future.
WiFi goes down and people sometimes NEED to communicate instead of streaming Netflix.
This is just an alternate channel, if Eheran doesn't have the imagination to understand how low bandwidth can still be extremely valuable, as compared to, say, screaming at the top of your lungs to attempt to be heard 5 miles away, then... I'm not really interested in what they think.
"WiFi goes down"
Or more to the point, the ISP fails. A Wi-Fi router isn't that much more difficult to power than a meshtastic node, but my old ISP, I don't think they even bothered to install UPSes, if the power was out, so was the internet. I could keep my Wi-Fi up indefinitely, but it's basically useless outside my house.
Yeah, whenever I tell the kids "WiFi is down" what that really means is "Comcast has killed our link, again."
They're a godsend for camping, and would be legendary in a disaster event.
Low power requirements, battery + solar power source... this isn't science fiction anymore.