What is old is new again!
Happy Friday y’all got some exciting meshtastic news. The Comms Channel just dropped a video demoing a Mail and Bulletin Board Service for Meshtastic. The video is linked down below, but here’s what you need to know.
- What is it? - It’s an old-school BBS and Mail server. Think email in the early 90’s. Or a digital version bulletin board and mailbox in real life. You can post public or private messages on it and access them whenever you are in range of a node running the server.
- Why? Meshtastic is like all radio comms, whenever you try to reach someone, they have to be in range to receive the message. If their radio is off, or they’re out and about (and out of range) then they’re not going to be able to receive your message. This is bad, and one reason why we’ve become so reliant on email, text messages and modern messaging apps. The message will get to you at some point, so long as you go check your mail.
- Because Meshtastic is so polished on the app side, you can often forget it is just like a traditional radio that just does text instead of voice, so running into problems that arise from this (like not getting every message in a group chat, or missing someone trying to reach out to you) can be jarring.
- The Mail server solves this problem, at least in part. If someone is unable to contact you for whatever reason, but they know you have access to a BBS-enabled mesh node nearby, they can leave you a message for you to check when you’re back on the mesh network.
- The BBS server is like the mail server, but is public-access. This is great for posting messages that the whole net needs to have access to like in the case of AustinMesh - which has best practices it could post the service. Or, if you were using a mesh network for a disaster relief effort, you could post open routes or locations that need specific services to relief groups.
Overall, this is a very well-thought out system that I’m looking forward to testing.
