this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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on mesh networks. these already exist for basic communication, and are pretty cheap to be a part of since you can either purchase ready-to-use communicators, or make your own. the relays can also run off very small solar panels, and be stuck in a tree, on a post, or on a roof because they are tiny. best of all, the government can't control them and they feature E2EE.
well if the government wants to put signal jammers every mile or so in order to jam a mesh network, then good on them. they'll have spent trillions of dollars and years upon years building the infrastructure.
and if they don't spend trillions to blanket the entire country with jammers, then it would be absolutely pointless because the network would just work around whatever gaps there are, just as it does today.
No. They identify your location, confiscate all your stuff, give you a stiff fine and then send you to jail.
Yeah, they’re already trying to go after people who criticize them, and they control vast swaths of the internet, so I’m not going to let some handwringing about what they might do stop me.
you got any tutorials or suggested hardware to join a mesh network? id be interested... it's only a matter of time before the public internet is just unusable.
Not internet level replacement. But Meshcore running on ESP32 is pretty neat. I recently set up my RasPi 4b with a LoRa Hat and set it up using pymc_repeater to set it up a repeater at my apt. https://meshcore.co.uk/
*meshtastic
No thank you. I mean Meshcore.
MeshCore exists
To join you need to either have an established mesh network already (assuming you don't want to start a ISP)
right i found meshtastic.org through lemmy ... and its a cool concept ... purchase some hardware and join the network... download app... and you can do text communication... i was just wondering if there were more robust mesh networks with more capabilities than a text message. id rather just get prepared for when the rug is pulled out from underneath us and we have to get an anal cavity search just to check the weather.
What exactly are you looking for?
Not OP, but I personally would like to see a mesh-based low-bandwidth HTTP alternative, like Gemini. A tool set for sharing things more persistent than text messaging (or ideally building other digital services with) while being compatible with the underlying lower performance hardware and wireless medium.
Http doesn't have that much overhead (especially when you want to send things in the MB range)
What kinds of applications are you talking about? Are you thinking TCP/IP connectivity or something slower?
You can build a network mesh out of wireless point to point and 802.11s mesh networks. It is all TCP/IP networking so you can run any application you want over it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_(protocol)
https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Wiki
Edit:
I forgot about HaLow. It is lower bandwidth but it has a much longer range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
There are a few metros around the world that have higher speed community networks (NYC Mesh, Freifunk, etc). If you get a HAM license, you could try participating in stuff like AREDN which uses modified WiFi access points. Depending on where you are, you'd likely have to start a group or club to start building out infrastructure.
Reticulum seems cool since it can work over all kinds of different networking technologies, even regular ol' WiFi and whatnot. Higher bandwidth channels can talk to lower bandwidth channels, and vice versa.
It has its own problems with scale and actual users out in the wild, as well as I believe some issues getting proper code contributions and consistent maintenance.