My First Meshtastic Network
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As one enthusiast dove into setting up their first Meshtastic network, the community sprang into action - but not entirely in support. Critics, some claiming expertise in mesh networks, chimed in to voice concerns over Meshtastic's design and functionality, pointing out suboptimal modulation schemes and a messy codebase. Defenders of the protocol fired back, suggesting that criticism is easy after the fact, and that developing a community-driven mesh network is no trivial task. The debate highlights the tension between hobbyist innovation and technical rigor in the mesh networking space.
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Dec 29, 2025 at 12:12 AM EST
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How exciting!
Meshtastic is a bad protocol developed by toxic people in way over their heads.
Beware of using their trademark! They’ll send you a cease and desist letter.
Here's an example of a good criticism: https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215
I have no experience with the community, but if they couldn't have been bothered with understanding AlohaNet from several decades previous, than maybe it's not surprising.
I myself have been fairly critical of meshtastic, you can probably search for bb88 and meshtastic to find more criticisms.
To save you some time, I live in a fairly populous city with a bunch of meshtastic nodes, and can't get a message accross from me to my friend who lives one hop away.
"Thought experiments about mesh networking"
"Hard Lessons Learned -- What not to do"
"Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking"
Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand."
Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.
Try making some specific suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities of such a network.
otherwise the criticism seems to summarize as "it's slow and bad" and well. okay? that's hardly constructive, whether or not it's accurate.
the whole thing reads like "the solution is left as an exercise to the reader ;)" because it sounds like it's written by and for people who are already experts and just want to read a cathartic list of flaws they already know.
The more popular the network, the more frequent these message stomps happen. Flood routing makes these stomps more frequent.
There is also no end to end packet acknowledgement system like tcp, so at hop 3 (e.g.) if the message got stomped on, who would know?
so there's one bit of probably-usable advice (slightly raise cost for significant benefits) and one that completely misses the point (charge at least 5-10x more for wildly different hardware, use hundreds of times more power, etc). the article spends several times more text on the latter.
flood routing and lack of end to end ack I also agree with, I sincerely doubt those are the best options and if user complaints are any sign then I think it's an existence proof that it doesn't scale, exactly as predicted. neither are part of that article, though it is in a linked also-large mastodon thread, which has basically just one constructive suggestion (8x the channels) and many "this sucks" examples (flood fill, hop limit, etc. it amounts to "do better", not "X is better, learn from it").
FT-8 doesn't seem usefully relevant here. The fact that the bandwidth is so low that it can be sampled with a sound card isn't at all helpful when Meshtastic doesn't require a PC. And FT-8 carries minimal payload (typically amounting to no more than the automated status updates you dislike Meshtastic wasting airtime on), and I've never heard of anyone doing routing over FT-8. You're just making noise about a completely unrelated niche radio hobby.
If the constraints of LoRa and Meshtastic don't make it possible to implement the kind of radio system you want to play with, that doesn't prove that Meshtastic has made any wrong decisions. It just says you would get a more fulfilling experience from getting into a different radio hobby, and stop getting in the way of potentially productive discussions about how Meshtastic could be improved within the constraints of the currently-existing commodity hardware.
In the article you linked, there are three paragraphs about Meshtastic in a 150-paragraph newsletter about several topics. The criticism seems to be that they they use digipeating, and then it refers to a Fedi thread[1] which is more coherent but still fairly vague. The upshot seems to be that flood routing doesn't scale, which is a fair criticism but feels disproportionate to the level of vitriol against the project.
The Fedi thread also adds that the Meshtastic founders were rude or unprofessional to him but doesn't cite any specifics or evidence.
I see this a lot with Meshtastic. People keep saying the founders are toxic and disrespectful of the community but it's always in these vague terms so I don't know what's driving it.
But specifically in this thread, I agree with sibling poster that you're being disrespectful and arguing ineffectively by pointing to such poor resources and then blaming other people for being unconvinced or confused.
[0] https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/
[1] https://partyon.xyz/@nullagent/113861754522594610
I think the vitriol from those who are in the space either professionally or as an amateur comes from the fact Meshtastic is repeating mistakes we knew about in the 80s at the latest, for which reams if literature freely exists.
It would be more fair to criticize Meshtastic for not being clear enough about the tradeoffs and limitations inherent in a low-speed ad-hoc mesh network, and for not actively encouraging people to seek other hardware and software if their use cases are not well-matched to what Meshtastic hardware is capable of. A one size fits all solution simply isn't possible, and Meshtastic can't be the right answer for everyone.
Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing, but I don't even see a movement to switch over to something more robust.
I'd argue it's everything. A network architecture that requires serious fixed infrastructure should probably be an entirely separate project from the ad-hoc mesh formed solely by cheap battery-powered portable/handheld gadgets. And everyone should be realistic about what "meaningful traffic" is for a network with a default data rate of ~1kbps; it's not reasonable to expect that to support the kind of chatter a busy IRC server would see.
Have YOU ever tried interacting with the developers? No?
* They made incredibly poorly designed software — the firmware and the mobile apps — and then yell at you for “using it wrong” * The refuse to admit they made a mistake with the 7 hop limit and call you an idiot for not believing in their garbage “simulator” * They write nasty responses to app reviews and GitHub issues because they’re petulant children. Just go read the responses, and look at the hissyfit the of the primary app developer in discord. * They’ve taken down multiple community groups because they decided they needed to be a business rather than an open-source project. Seriously just go look at the history in their discord #trademark channel. They’re on the verge of evil.
All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I have. I emailed them a couple of weeks ago and they responded promptly and professionally.
> All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
You want me to read thousands of GitHub issue comments and discord messages in search of bad behavior?
If you have examples of the Meshtastic team behaving badly, why not link to them? The burden of proof is on you, not me.
I don't have a dog in this fight. I think LoRa messaging is neat but I have no investment or relationship with Meshtastic in particular.
Hobbyist "mesh networking" communities readily adopt suboptimal modulation, frame specification, packet format, encoding, ineffective mesh arrangements, flood-prone routing mechanisms, poor reference hardware, and bloated user interfaces, while often ignoring basic practices like forward error correction, collision detection/multiplexing, trust mechanisms. Community solutions tend to be opinionated in the worst ways ("we assumed you'd use an arduino" or "here's a mandatory packet header field to indicate whether you're currently in a hot air balloon") and under-constrained in areas where opinion would be helpful "our client UI has 75 configurable options -- get one wrong and you won't be able to communicate."
By the time there is a "community" it's too late to address these issues: network effects have already locked in the worst design decisions.
Have they figured out that flood routing is a terrible routing mechanism?
Have a good day.
In Europe. See the duty cycle limits summarized at https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#region
Everything beyond 1 Hop is often unusable. The public chat room only sees fragments of discussions.
MT clients are just too chatty. That most Roles can act as a (delayed) Router was IMHO a bad design decision.
Also that they blocked the term " Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a weird taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.
Hopefully MT catches up. Their GPLv3 license is much more attractive to me than the MC MIT.
There are significant downsides to the changes Meshcore made to achieve more reliability in some use cases; it's absolutely not an all-around improvement that Meshtastic necessarily needs to "catch up" to, and downplaying or hiding the downsides doesn't help anyone. At the same time, Meshtastic proponents should be more honest about the scalability limitations of their approach.
Re: licensing, last thing I read was the MC was... at least awkward: a "core" being "open", and then some "modules" that you need to pay for (to run on your device). I don't really care for a project like this, even if they backpaddled from this scenario. I'd rather wait for yet another third option, that is free open source and would have the supposed protocol improvements.
The good thing is, after all, that the same LoRa radio devices can be flashed with one or the other, if I understood correctly.
The good news is that almost all Meshtastic hardware can be flashed with the MeshCore firmware (and vice versa). This makes it straightforward to dive into both relatively easily.
the result is predictable... a few "test? can anyone see this?" every few days and most of the radio channel is used up by signalization between the nodes. Then somone adds a new node in some area further away (parents' place, work, whatever), sets up mqtt, connects two such meshes together, and we get the same 'test?' but now in italian.
Making it smaller (city-wide) and have people actually talk there would be much better, but for now, everyone just wants to make it bigger.
Write me if you are willing to experiment :)
Oh yeah I saw that behaviour on the lineageos irc too. Mentioning microG gets you instabanned there. Micro G is an excellent Google Play Services alternative which is open source. But the lineage guys hate it because they're afraid of pissing Google off.
him stepping away might slow things a little but there’s already enough functional stuff and actively maintained nomadnet pages that i’m frankly surprised at how few people have heard of this project.
Separately: while it's cool to chat human-style over these networks, lately I've been thinking that the real value add is last-mile automations. Stuff that won't clog the network like remote-starting your car once or twice a day, and is normally built on top of LTE.
What I think you can do for sure today is poll a sensor over the mesh.
Triangulation will work as long as you transmit. But it will be difficult as LoRa works down to -145dBm which is an extremely weak signal.
The trick is understanding LoRa's trick, which is simply to "skew" the signal across time (via chirps), modulo a window of the configured bandwidth around the center frequency. The key is that the skew rate is purely a function of the spreading factor, bandwidth, and IQ polarity (= pol × BW² / 2^SF), so there's a small-ish finite number of skew rates. So you can just modulate raw IQ data with carriers at each of these skew rates to find one which gives you a bunch of carrier waves that hop around discretely at about twice the symbol rate, looking like an FSK signal. You can then bin this at a factor of, say 2^(SF-1) to correlate the signal and raise it up above the noise floor, on which you can apply any standard triangulation technique.
I'll try vetting this soon and reply to this post with results.
Is your goal nondetection? If so, know that triangulating a radio signal is fairly straightforward, even in a dragnet fashion. The exception I think is something like cryptographic DSSS (found in military use) wherein not only is the signal far below the noise floor, but the spreading function is not predictable by an adversary (LoRa being very much predictable). Even then, you're limited by physics to only be able to transmit so far without the signal being detectable near the transmitter.
Unfortunately the meshes in most/all US metros have coalesced around these settings, meaning one is forced to choose between linking with "the" mesh, or operating legally.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-15/section-15.247...
Either prove it by getting both mesh projects in trouble with the government or shut it. Your constant whining is annoying.
I need a few messages transmitted to as many peers as possible once in a while.
Nothing illegal, just a small contribution to the economy.
We're selling pure herbal organic medicine which helps males perform better, and our product announcement will fit perfectly in you 200 characters limit.
In short, all messages are sent within windows, which include waiting periods within which the broadcasting node listens for any other node to rebroadcast the same message. Upon seeing the message be rebroadcast, it stops attempting to send.
I live 5 miles west of the maker space in the last photo, and I've been thinking about getting some Meshtastic nodes...
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