Concept has been around for a looong while. Surprised at the amount of interest this is getting. A lot of the protestors in Hong Kong used it back in the day.
People need to become aware of meshtastic. Even better, because you aren’t limited by BLE.
Discussion
the closest thing is firechat. meshtastic needs additional hardware.
And Bridgefy. Yes, meshtastic needs additional modest hardware. I don’t see that as a weakness for what it grants.
My point was that solutions have been around, some with more options and flexibility than others, depending on the need. If people are really this excited about this app and it’s not just more bandwagon following, they should know these other solutions too.
Reticulum would work with BLE as well as LoRa, TCP/IP and other transports. Does chunking for files, real time audio etc.
Have you checked Bridgefy also?… get’s recommended to people in earthquake zones a lot… for in case of…
#Reticulum also works with only a mobile phone, but still lacks the Bluetooth Interface. But WiFi already works out of the box. Should be the same with BT one day.
I've never seen anything that worked this seamlessly across devices in the past
Bluetooth sucks and I think we still need more people to move away from cell phones, towards MURS and CB type stuff, but this is really groundbreaking for the many phone havers
I remember that was a thing in the 2014 protests and IIRC they were mostly using it not because anything was blocked by the government but because the cell networks were simply overloaded due to the density of devices.
Yep! And there are many other examples. Palestine and Haiti come to mind.
The Nintendo DS Lite had this *built in* in 2008! It used WiFi instead of Bluetooth - which people will use as an excuse to dunk, not realizing WiFi has extended range AND bandwidth over BLE.
Meanwhile, the HAM crowd is waving their arms around pointing to LoRa, LoRaWAN, meshify, reticulum.. that you can buy a lilygo t-deck for < $100 that does all of the above…the freedom tech for this has been here in many UX-friendly form factors for almost 2 decades.