https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-mesh...
There's no mention of Meshtastic.
MeshCore didn’t “fork” from Meshtastic. Meshtastic is a lost cause, with toxic incompetent devs.
Nor did it fork from itself. The official website/discord changed, and the community abandoned a cuck of a human being.
You’d know that if you had the ability to read, but clearly you don’t. I just realized you won’t be able to read this either. Sad.
https://reticulum.network/start.html has an overview and how to connect.
There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide
If you just want to play with it https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html has a list of clients and software using it.
Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules!
Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are.
Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach.
Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing.
You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!
Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means?
What is the use case?
This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.
In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound.
I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days
You could also use their site planner to plan out optimal placement: https://site.meshtastic.org/
That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use).
That's with Meshtastic
With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region.
This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.
Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.
jqpabc123•1h ago