My experience of the #fediverse :
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@_elena I’d suggest buy two nodes, so you can tell if it’s working or not. The second one is always going to be useful if you put it somewhere near you and high up. Having two is reassuring when you see it working between the two.
In fact, there’s MeshCore and Meshtastic, it’s worth being on both depending on the exact area (some are more MeshCore, some are more Meshtastic), so really, I’d suggest getting four nodes!
You’ll end up buying more than that in the long run, maybe not all at once in one go.
I also wrote up a page on which nodes I recommend for giving to family members, once you’re into it and can’t stop buying nodes (too early to reveal that?) pikopublish.ing/u0421793/bolg/whichradio.xhtml@u0421793 thank you for all the helpful insights Ian. I've bookmarked your toot and I will definitely use it as reference
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@_elena watch out! Speaking of MacGyver can be used as an age verification criterion...
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@_elena
I'm starting my Big Tech de-cluttering.
If it's not a secret, what else are you self-hosting?@banshee7076 awesome!
In terms of other things I'm self-hosting:
- Umami (a privacy-respecting, FOSS, Google Analytics alternative)
- LinkStack (a FOSS Linktree alternative)
- Pixelfed
- I just installed AppFlowy (a FOSS Notion alternative) but I have yet to set it up and try itEdit/Update: I'm not self-hosting it but paying for Linkwarden (a FOSS Pocket alternative)
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My experience of the #fediverse :
Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication
️@_elena it's very hard to get people's on fediverse or #opensource platform. I barely managed to get 3 friends over signal from WhatsApp.
. Nobody wants to leave WhatsApp or insta 
.whenever I tell them about signal or Mastodon they laughed and asked me... What? Signal? Mastodon? -
@_elena it's very hard to get people's on fediverse or #opensource platform. I barely managed to get 3 friends over signal from WhatsApp.
. Nobody wants to leave WhatsApp or insta .whenever I tell them about signal or Mastodon they laughed and asked me... What? Signal? Mastodon?@GOKUSHRM @_elena the few people i've managed to convince to open a Signal account just message me through WhatsApp anyway, or uninstall the app after a few weeks
more attention needs to be brought to the fact that WhatsApp is extremely likely to be backdoored and it's owned by an *evil* corporation that lives off of exploiting people's interests or insecurities for hyper-targeted advertising, it's in their best interest to PRETEND their platform is secure so users think they're not being watched
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@fmors 14 years on Twitter (2008-2022) and I didn't learn a single thing.
4 years on the Fediverse and I feel like MacGyver
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@GOKUSHRM @_elena the few people i've managed to convince to open a Signal account just message me through WhatsApp anyway, or uninstall the app after a few weeks
more attention needs to be brought to the fact that WhatsApp is extremely likely to be backdoored and it's owned by an *evil* corporation that lives off of exploiting people's interests or insecurities for hyper-targeted advertising, it's in their best interest to PRETEND their platform is secure so users think they're not being watched
@synnef @GOKUSHRM I wrote about how I deleted my Whatsapp account and moved to Signal in January 2020: https://therealists.org/2020/01/quitting-whatsapp-facebook-s-grand-illusion/
The post was written at the time of my departure and I convinced 90% of my friends and family to install Signal to keep communicating with me. I got entire groups to move there. My proudest moment in my FOSS journey
For those who didn't move, we kept communicating via SMS or iMessage.
6 years later I feel super grateful about how smooth this transition was
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@kiwiWolle hahaha
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My experience of the #fediverse :
Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication️ -
@andy @james @_elena I’m getting all the way up and down England and since a day or so ago Northern Ireland too, also, as well now on MeshCore.
On Meshtastic I’m able to get from home in Beckton Park to Royal Albert dock, which is about one stop on the DLR. There’s no conversation on it ever, nobody ever replies, but it has an impressive mesh map with lots of coloured blobs on.@u0421793 @james @_elena I’ve not used Meshtastic, though I believe there’s a fair bit of non-human traffic on there, while MeshCore is more chat-focused. I may be mistaken, but that's the impression I have.
There was some difference regarding the way messages are repeated between the two as well, though I forget exactly what. I know on #MeshCore that Repeaters can't be Companions and vice-versa, and static repeaters are strongly encouraged.
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@weldon thank you, I'll check this out (I got multiple recommendations about it)
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My experience of the #fediverse :
Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication️Haaa looking at meshcore also!
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My experience of the #fediverse :
Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication️@_elena and here i am...fresh new out of FB hellhole knowing absolutely nothing, wondering left and right and seeing this...is radio communication getting back or do i read it wrong?
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People who use X are increasingly radicalised until they end up as Nazis.
People who use Mastodon are increasingly radicalised until they end up as C programmers.
@david_chisnall @_elena what an excellent note, especially in light of this paper I just read yesterday, on C's longevity https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell17some-preprint.pdf "Some Were Meant for C"
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@u0421793 @james @_elena I’ve not used Meshtastic, though I believe there’s a fair bit of non-human traffic on there, while MeshCore is more chat-focused. I may be mistaken, but that's the impression I have.
There was some difference regarding the way messages are repeated between the two as well, though I forget exactly what. I know on #MeshCore that Repeaters can't be Companions and vice-versa, and static repeaters are strongly encouraged.
@andy @james @_elena it can depend on the area. Meshtastic in London is basically useless, it doesn’t work. I can send messages out but nobody replies, they’re either ignoring it or aren’t receiving it. The only times it works is if a plane flies over and someone on it has a node and they’re sending out messages saying that they’re on a plane (usually with the flight no.). Then it works. All the other time, never.
If I go up to Crewe, though, there’s a load of people all around that pretty wide area all chatting all day, and I get most of the messages and people get my replies. Except when I’m in the house, those old houses are impenetrable.
MeshCore is quite popular there too, so both of them seem to run side by side. Except when I go up there, I’m only taking my companion node on MeshCore, obviously I’m leaving my repeater node behind.
If I go to Gibraltar, there’s loads of Meshtastic people chatting, although it’s almost all from the south of Spain, in Spanish. But it’s all day long. MeshCore in Gib was zero.
When we went to Jamaica at the end of last year a few weeks after Melissa, I took lots of nodes, within our family we had three MeshPockets mostly for use as Qi2 phone topping up battery banks, but which incidentally helped expand the mesh, but which mesh - the ones I took out to experiment with were a pair of T114s, and a pair of Seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed T1000e [1] and tried them on all the different region settings, the US setting, the EU/UK setting, lots of them. In the end I concluded that Jamaica should be AU915, the Australian setting, and with MeshCore I found that as soon as we went down the road a little bit, the contact with the T114 (acting as a repeater) at the house was lost, so MeshCore never really worked out there for us, as we were literally the only people (well I was, the rest of the family weren’t interested) with mesh radios of any kind. MeshCore’s dependence upon a fixed repeater was useless because within minutes whenever we went anywhere, we were out of range of it.
So in the end I switched all the ones I took to Jamaica over to Meshtastic on AU915, and when we left, Jamaica, I left behind the two T114s and the two T1000es with family (and some fold-up solar panels I didn’t want to take back with me). Indubitably those are probably lost or gone and have never been charged since we left, but who knows, they’re there anyway, so maybe they might be useful in the long run.
That’s what I mean, that’s why I suggest to try both, and try and have a pair of each (MC and MT) so you can see stuff happening at least by yourself.
[1] not the ‘for Meshtastic’ ones, I couldn’t get those in time, so I got a pair of the ‘for LoRaWan’ ones, but that didn’t matter, because with the MeshCore or Meshtastic firmware on they acted exactly the same as the other would’ve been -
My experience of the #fediverse :
Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication️@_elena hi hello! Similar experience for me, except the pipeline went from #retroHandhelds to #Meshtastic. I now have two nodes, with two more on the way.
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My experience of the #fediverse :
Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication️@_elena
One of us! One of us! -
My experience of the #fediverse :
Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication️@_elena Nice! I bought a little Heltec LoRa kit a few months ago that I still haven't taken out of the box.
If you end up doing a writeup on it, I'll be sure to check it out! -
My experience of the #fediverse :
Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication️@_elena Tech people do doomsday prepping in a different way. Lol.
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