Oh yes, Wi-Fi was cheap, but before HaLow we ended giving up because we couldn't get a meaningful density for the network to get far enough across town to start to be remotely useful, even with 10-15dBi antennas mounted outside.
About the messaging aspect, I mean that though a messaging app is great, I feel that the end goal is having an independent network from the telcos, carriers, etc. In that sense we're going to need to allow more than an SMS replacement.
And from there is born the problem. Bootstraping such a network for more than geeks is relatively impossible in that context. You either have a device that does one thing as a drop-in magic solution for newcomers to jump on, or you chase the better solution, but that brings as much complexity, if not more, as running the Internet...
And while I'm happy to see p2p and mesh research continuing, participate when I can, I just feel like it's a pipe dream that is far far away and I'd like to see it grow beyond the few dozens of decentralization geeks in every city :)
In Montréal we've rebooted Réseau Libre which used to be a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago.
It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me.
Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app.
On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc. and I fear we're wasting time when in the end what wins is controlling the backbone bandwidth, but with the added difficulty of a p2p mesh.
I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
It was pretty funny to see Qwen 3.6 (heretic) tell me about how many death the Chinese government thought happened at Tiananmen Sq. on April 15th 1989.
Makes you wonder where that data was taken from, or if their great firewall is broken, or even if Alibaba engineers have special access...
The worst thing about this is a company saying you need to lock yourself on one of the 2 proprietary platform that somehow didn't just wrap the web for apps and use a ridiculously small device you might own, but anyone on an open standard system can go F themselves...
I'd be curious to see people give their opinion on embedded models for less tech focused needs, say what's that bug killing spray chemistry like or what is the history of this or that...
I'd also be curious to see if people have started doing censorship analysis of various models, like Qwen differing Tiananmen square to government documments while Llama straights up answers the question.
Until these OS also start putting forward something like WebOS that tried to get phones back to on open web, there is no breaking the binary format and Appstore monopoly.
I wish Europe would have forced that 10 years ago since the US is beyond saving.