this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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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.
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.
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/