One of the main differences with MeshCore is that client nodes don't repeat messages, only dedicated repeater nodes repeat with the idea that they should be placed in more ideal locations.

Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.

> Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.

Thats not the problem. And Ive also mentioned Meshcore as well on their discord with no threats of banning or anything of the sort. Ive also seen people come in the group, with "Meshtastic sucks and Meshcore is best", and the worst by admins was 'we have no problem discussing but that tone was overly harsh'.

Liam Kottle, the head of Meshcore ran the first Meshtastic map from grabbed MQTT data. However, he was grabbing and saving everything, including public channels, direct messages, GPS, telemetry. Everything. 1.5y ago, people were going to his map and snooping on Defcon Meshtastic DM's, since even 1 node who reported MQTT would send everything. And then, DMs were simply filtered by the UI, but were effectively encrypted by the same shared key.

Normally there was a general expectation that the data was ephemeral. Liam basically created and caused this data problem by saving and making available everything sent to MQTT.

Meshtastic devs ended up having to tighten down the public MQTT broker a bunch. They also made the client on phones be more restrictive what was done and sent to MQTT. Also made "OK to forward MQTT" flag in the data packets too. And 2.5 introduced PKI TOFU for direct messages to prevent leakage.

Aside the personnel difficulties, the technical issues with Meshcore are similar at node capacity too. Messages still dont get delivered near capacity. Core requires infrastructure nodes. Its more like APRS+LoRa than anything like a mesh.

It's unfair to assign that much blame to assign to any one person. I think it's more fair to say that the Meshtastic community as a whole has a problem with people making overly-narrow assumptions about the goals and what use cases Meshtastic is intended for, suitable for, or usable for. As a result, the community was able to do a lot of development work seemingly without considering that there could even be privacy concerns. And then they had to scramble to retrofit a lot of privacy controls that would have been obvious requirements all along to people coming at the project with a different mindset.

Some people want Meshtastic to be rock-solid communication infrastructure for use in a doomsday or disaster scenario. Some people want to use it to undermine the importance of cellular communications networks. Some people want it to be used much like CB radio as a local public conversation channel. Some people envision it used mostly with stationary transmitters, while other people want to use it entirely with mobile nodes. I use it primarily for group location sharing (many to many), since the location sharing capabilities Apple and Google provide for their smartphone platforms only easily support one-to-one or one-to-several location sharing.

It seems that at scale meshcore is much better. The more nodes you get, the worst it gets with Meshtastic after a certain point. For meshcore you now have entire regions connected in a single mesh with hundreds of nodes.

Sad to see open source communities being so insecure that they feel threatened by an alternative project. Both can coexist and competition is good.

The Meshtastic community is almost as toxic as the ham radio one.

MeshCore app is way better than the Meshtastic one.

Agreed. Ran the comms for my burning man camp and everyone kept getting confused with the channels mess among other usability issues. I like where Mesh core is going, just wish the repeater nodes could run on gateway hardware so they don’t become the choke point with a half-duplex radio (bs like 8 full duplex channels on the RAK wireless gateway)