The range is extremely limited, and the throughput gets really bad if your packets have to travel more than a few hops. These two factors alone combine to write this off as nothing more than a toy pretty much from the start.
There are already unlicensed radios with longer range that would be a better starting point if people were trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.
>Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.
This point isn't unique to meshcore, and it is not a guarantee. Any solar powered and battery-backed device can function without utility power (in theory). Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.
At something like $100/node and 5000 nodes in a major metro (eg: Dallas) it's like a $500k investment and you're maxed out at low data rates and saturated topology.
That's 5k nodes in a (generous) 5 million population and ~500 square mile area. More like 9M people and 9000 square miles. (I checked, and that's "extended metroplex", but reasonable: Decatur to Cleburne, Weatherford to Kaufman).
At 5k nodes saturating an area, it's basically a rich persons toy very well suitable to remote or low-density areas, but NEVER for 1:1 saturation deployment in any sort of high density area.
>comically weak
This has been said about every interchange technology, ever. Doesn’t matter, still EOF’ed.
>trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.
.. well, scale is a matter of one thing: location, location, location ...
>range
.. is an end-user value decision, as in, you might think its too slow for your browsing needs, but there are a thousand applications that will use the bandwidth offered to the average user, at the average users own personal speed, according to the needs of the average user.
Just like in the good ol’ days of soggy noodle internetworking, the current zeitgeist apropos mesh-based local low-power radio technology, is entirely ruled by the user.
Case in point: some friends and I have deployed our own small Meshtastic network, and we use it exclusively to organize our social network. This particular use case isn’t particularly ‘easily’ exploitable by third parties, since we have some modicum of encryption - but it certainly supports our need here and now in a big city - but, more importantly some of us will take the little lovely boxes with them when they go sailing next week, and our range will be significantly extended for the purpose …
>Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.
If you need solar, build a meshcore node with solar.
Nay-saying like this is as old as the hills, there’s nothing special about it, everyone does it…
Isn't it the case with Meshtastic and Reticulum too? It feels like it should be part of the definition of mesh network.
Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.
Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
Not sure why people are so hyper-focused on the La Liga case in Spain, Spain done so much worse censorship, even political one, yet no one seemingly bats an eye. But some IPs getting blocks because Cloudflare doesn't follow Spanish law? Suddenly half of HN cares about it, it makes no sense...
How about when a Women's rights website started being blocked in Spain? (https://digitalfreedomfund.org/case-studies/womens-rights-we...) How about the Gag Law that existed since 2015, limiting public demonstrations? How about when the central government prevented an "autonomous" region from even thinking about having a referendum? How about the laws against "insulting" the crown?
Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
There has been so much censorship here, so much more important censorship than some random piracy stream websites going offline, yet not a single person here seems to remember those more important cases, just as long as a US company involved, then suddenly it's important and worth referencing.
Freedom on the world wide web and the public internet been kind of hanging by a thread for multiple decades at this point, and I'm also on the side of "We need new physical infrastructure if we're gonna have a chance".
Meshtastic, Guifi, Freifunk, NYCMesh and more are wonderful efforts that hopefully at one point can group together, we all have more or less the same ideas and same goals, right now it's all separate networks though.
I didn't know about this, so I looked it up: it's because they sell prescription-only abortion medication and ship directly to consumers, where it's legally only available via prescription and medical oversight. Fundamentally they're blocked for ignoring medical regulations. There were some appeals, but the argument is that access to abortion medication is already a well-protected right, so that this is dangerous and unnecessary, and it's not possible to block that while unblocking the rest of their educational resources.
Using a VPN, and trying to use that website to "order abortion pills" today to Spain shows this error:
> You live in a country where there is access to safe abortion services. We don't provide services in your country and we therefore are unable to assist you.
You haven't been able to get abortion pills from them for years, yet the same reason for the block remains, even if that's not actually true in practice.
The block is being escalated to UN though, so it's still an ongoing issue, not like nothing is happening, just frustrating to see people complaining about minor censorship when there is so much more important censorship happening all the time.
Can't they just triangulate the nodes and hack or unplug them? And put whoever objects into prison?