I like this idea. I have custom channels, but they are either private or quasi-private (like the HackerComms channel, which will be at every HackerCon from now on).

I got the weather on LongFast when I was visiting Seattle, which was an absolute delight. Might be better on its own channel, but than again, I wouldn't have found it if it weren't on LongFast.

I feel like bots could have some potential. Like send "/channels" on LongFast to see channels, and then something like "/7day" to get the 7 day forecast on demand. Could be done with a computer over serial or MQTT with a node that is on wifi. Probably already several projects that do it, if you can find 'em. Link us to them if you know of a meshtastic bot program that actually works.

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I actually created the Alerts channel for my space weather bot. It was posting space weather alerts to LongFast but I didn't want to annoy people at odd hours if they weren't interested. I had my bot post a notification to LongFast occasionally for a few days to let users know about the channel.

To do all this I'm using #homeassistant as a back end which is really easy if you already have HA set up. Then the bot has access to all kinds of data online and off. I can also control HA using meshtastic messages.

I like the idea about a regular channels announcement. I think I'll implement it today. Here's my current bot menu. It only replies to DMs currently. Considering creating a prefix that it would respond to in LongFast.