There’s a new server planned relatively locally to me and it’s capitalising on the terrifying plunge into fascism that all the Big Socials now have as their badge of dishonour. People have never been “happy” to be on Facebook but the local focus in a pretty leftie iinet city area is a good idea. If people know people irl on Fedi they will maybe have an easier time.

I love Tusky, it is my app of choice for Mastodon

It’s the tusks, clearly.

They’d shut down large instances, pressure WordPress to remove support, in the US at least, it could be seen as too risky, if they wanted to they would find a way. I don’t think this would happen easily in the EU though.

I think, If we have any credible threat, it’s going to be from the Governmental gross anti-tampering laws, forced moderation, or backup regulations. They could make it legally difficulty for us to exist

This. I have considerable concern that Fascists will straight up ban Fedi if enough people shift to it. They don’t like not being able to control everything, Fedi is far too much actual freedom of communication.

Not really good for the people buying in those areas that will soon be uninsurable because of climate risk.

Yup! Meshtastic makes a lot of sense for a whole range of use cases. I am also a festival goer and having text comms can be very useful in those circumstances.

For their size the T1000-E’s are impressive, I think for many people they are the most practical EDC but folks will often have something else as a base station on their roof.

It would be very cool if someone were to release a mobile phone with LoRa built in.

Welcome! I’m a n00b but I’m having fun so far, and I’m interested in the responses you get here as I’m learning as I go!

I am very keen on standalone devices that don’t need a phone to function but haven’t explored that functionality as yet. I got a bunch of T1000-E’s for giving to local friends to test with and as an EDC, and a Station G2 as a home base station (haven’t got a keyboard for it yet but with that it becomes standalone with the canned message module). The T1000-E is super easy to set up and good to demo to people who aren’t too techy that might be interested. The station g2 needs more power but comes with a pretty good stock antenna. I’ve ordered a couple of the SenseCAP Indicators (currently backordered) as they look like they miiight be standalone(?) with the advanced firmware which doesn’t have a release date yet, and look fun even if not.

We only have a small mesh of 3 in our little town but my two friends are both into radio and way more experienced than me, and I think they are both impressed with the ease of use, and one is super keen and going to get a Station G2 as he can use it for HAM stuff too as he is licensed.

endless screaming

Good suggestion but no active churches no, and very small ex-church that I’m aware of in a, non particularly high location. We would need to be getting nodes ideally at the top of hills and there are quite a few!

The T1000-E is a truly impressively designed piece of kit. I feel like so much I’ve been into when on bleeding edge is janky or too easy to break, these are solid.

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That’s very helpful, thankyou! I am still working out the different modes and we’re just leaving everything as client at this point but good to know for when we get busier!

Yes for emergency services radio is probably better, but have had the conversation that those bands get very busy when there is actually an emergency, and unless you’re directly involved in the emergency response it’s better to keep quiet even if you have the devices. To keep everyone else in the loop a mesh would be really helpful and allows for direct comms between people without radio knowledge. I’ve done enough radio stuff at festivals to know it’s a bit daunting for beginners. But these days pretty much everyone, even your grandma, has a cell phone and most understand apps and text messages. So the learning curve is pretty small.

Keen on Reticulum, but my focus atm is Meshtastic because of the ease of use, both Android and iPhone are dead easy to set up in less than 2 minutes and my use case is for more local nodes in most cases that would be with people with minimal technical skills.

That’s great you have a node high up, I would love to do that here but not sure where it might be practical to do. What kind of tower is the 200 feet one?

I’m in the middle of the 400 and 200 meter people, they are in opposite directions. I was thinking the Station G2 would be good on the roof of the highest house to extend the mesh further but if no one else interested then I was going to do it on mine, which isn’t ideal but would have pretty good reach in one direction, but I’m fairly encouraged with the experiments so far. We get bushwalkers and campers & 4wders up in this area all the time so am expecting to see occasional nodes pop up temporarily if Meshtastic really takes off.

Thanks about the suggestion to try Long Slow, I decided to keep on the default of LongFast at least initially, due to potential for visitors to the region with nodes.

The worst case I’ve read about is BurningMan 2023, once enough people were on the mesh it completely stopped working and they had to write a special version of the app so it wouldn’t fail so badly… so it looks like there are ways to mitigate congested networks, but that is not stock. I admit I’m a complete newbie but there are some scathing comments about how poor Meshtastic is, though I’ve read others that say it’s fine for what it tries to do but not great for other purposes. So my gut tells me Reticulum would probably be a better long term protocol which you could develop a stand alone app for BBS, instead of piggybacking on Meshtastic app.

Absolutely love this idea. Am concerned anywhere with enough Meshtastic nodes for this to be busy enough to be useful would congest the mesh too much though, as I’ve been reading Meshtastic falls over completely once you have too many nodes communicating …? 🤔