Joining the Mesh Network
I recently joined MeshCore, yet another decentralized communication network, and I’m enjoying my time with it so far. With luck, I’ll never need to use it in an emergency situation.
Like walkie-talkies, MeshCore uses freely available radio waves, although it uses them to send text messages, not audio. I bought a MeshCore starter kit from Amazon that includes a development board about the size of a matchbook, an antenna, a case, and a battery that, strangely, sits outside of the case. (There are other enclosures available, and makers can 3D print their own.) The same board I bought for MeshCore can be reflashed to use Meshtastic, another decentralized network that uses radio waves, but in urban areas of the Seattle metropolitan area, I’ve read that MeshCore is more reliable.
The community around MeshCore is passionate, diverse, and welcoming. My post about MeshCore on Mastodon, a decentralized social network popular with open source developers, went “trending” within an hour, and attracted a reply from one developer plugging his open source project to make MeshCore work with Internet relay chat (IRC) software, which I haven’t tried yet. I’m on two Discord chat servers for local mesh networking communities, Puget Mesh and Cascadia Mesh. The latter group runs the I-5 Project, with the goal of creating a seamess network from Vancouver to Portland. All of this is volunteer-run, and the community is really active in helping new members get set up. As with IRC in the late ’90s, the MeshCore community is small and outside the mainstream, but it has goals that are more aligned with community than with ad targeting.
MeshCore is still an early stage product. Launched in late 2024, its userbase in my area overlaps heavily with ham radio users, many of whom have named their repeaters after their radio callsigns. A battery-powered MeshCore repeater, suitable for outdoor installation, is about $100 as I write this; many users have customized theirs with wind- and rain-proof mounts, solar panels, and larger antennas. No license is required to have a repeater, and they don’t draw very much power or take up much space. My tiny radio came with all the parts in little bags, but no instructions about how to put them together; I found a helpful YouTube video that walked me through the assembly, including some important warnings to stop me from bricking my brand-new radio. I installed the MeshCore app on my phone, and after pairing the radio via Bluetooth, I could see repeaters all around the region and messages coming in on the public channel.
Connectivity on MeshCore, as with any radio-based system, doesn’t work the same way as centralized client-server messaging does. After jumping straight into MeshCore, I saw a flood of public messages and repeater discovery notifications, even while my phone wasn’t connected to the Internet. My house doesn’t have a repeater nearby, so when I’m at home, fewer messages come through. As with FM radios and pagers, if my radio doesn’t have a strong enough signal, I don’t receive messages, and I don’t even know that I’ve missed them. I tried sending my lengthy public key to a fellow MeshCore user on Mastodon, asking them to send me a message, but they told me they weren’t able to get through. The primary public channel can be noisy, with chatter centering on new users testing the system and occasionally talking about the weather. People can also set up public “hashtag” channels, using the same #channel naming scheme that I remember from my IRC days. There are also ways to set up private channels, hidden behind a password, and encrypted for security.
I can imagine MeshCore being useful if a disaster knocks out cell towers, although I’m not sure that people’s home-mounted repeaters would be more durable than professionally built 5G towers. One other key use case would be protests, where carrying around one’s mobile phone could lead to their identity being compromised. There are several devices, such as the Lilygo T-Deck Plus, that include the LoRa long range communication equipment in a case with a hardware keyboard and a screen; the T-Deck Plus reminds me of my old BlackBerry, which had its own durable, pseudonymous messaging service. Carrying a T-Deck could become as useful for operational security as burner phones have been.
Is MeshCore fun? Absolutely. Is it going to displace mass-market, commercial messenger software like WhatsApp, or open source messengers like Signal? Almost certainly not, considering that you need to buy special hardware to use it. The fact that I can use this service for free, with a passionate and supportive community stretching from the city to the hinterlands, means that I might have another outlet if I ever need to communicate in an emergency without mobile data being available. Even if I never need it, I still think I’ve gotten a good return on the $30 I’ve spent on joining the mesh.