4 ms·

It says it only scales to 80 nodes, so sounds like you won't find a mesh to join unless you make it yourself and it can only be people you know. I want a globa

by fsmv 3y ago

It says it only scales to 80 nodes, so sounds like you won't find a mesh to join unless you make it yourself and it can only be people you know. I want a global mesh network to replace the internet

immibis 3y ago
The internet is already the global mesh network. It turns out one individual contributes nothing, compared to a 1000km 10000Gbps fiber link that costs millions of dollars to lay. But nobody is actually stopping you from getting ports at two DCs or IXes, somehow getting them connected to each other, then charging people to carry traffic between them. I got a price quote for about $800/month to carry 10Gbps 650km in Europe, so that's what you could potentially earn.
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
If you're interested in large meshes, check out wirepas, though it's based on 802.15.4 rather than LoRa. I was a Product Manager for a mesh based personnel tracking system on construction sites. We licensed Wirepas's tech for our solution... wound up learning a lot about the nuances of meshes.
xpe 3y ago
> I want a global mesh network to replace the internet What are your design criteria you have in mind? There are tough tradeoffs around discoverability, latency, availability, security.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Me too. I think the way forward--at least for now--is not large meshes, but partition tolerant apps. A search for "Is Taco Express open right now?" should not resolve a globally unique name to a globally unique address and then ask some distant server which will then ask for your location info so that it can figure out which taco express you mean. That's so fragile. Instead the search should propagate through whichever meshes happen to be in range until it encounters a node which is authoritative on Taco Express hours (which is probably a raspberry pi at the Taco Express). You get local results because they're local to the query. The problem of bridging these meshes is interesting, but it's just not that useful until we have an app ecosystem that doesn't rely on stable addresses for individual nodes. We need context addressing and pub/sub, not server addressing and request/response. It's going to require a pretty big conceptual shift. Sadly, I don't see that shift happening until some disaster convinces us that it's necessary.
- r14c 3y ago
  honestly i think the main obstacle to global mesh is the lack of a good business case, which is pretty intrinsic to the format. mesh makes it possible to remove almost all intermediaries, so its difficult to position a company in a place where they can capture a significant portion of the generated value. even though a global self-organizing comms network can clearly be seen as a net good. which is basically an echo of the funding issues present in many critical open source components. there are some arguments to be made for cryptocurrency in this space, but for a nascent physical network the value proposition at first will be very small. a VC/startup could try to get into this space, but once the cat is out of the bag it would be very easy to bypass the artificial billing mechanism to create a rogue free mesh using a similar protocol. of course, this doesn't include the very real technical challenges of building a scalable mesh protocol. which are nontrivial in themselves.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Agreed on all points. > its difficult to position a company in a place where they can capture a significant portion of the generated value That's why I want to make the change. Companies tend to wane in trustworthiness over time, but maybe not if they were painfully aware that their relevance depends on explicit trust configs which could be altered by the end user at any moment and with minimal pain on the user's part. Eventually things will get bad enough that a market emerges for businesses that create handcuffs for other businesses... the spiritual successor to VPN's or somesuch. Until then, it's hobbyist stuff. That, or it'll be the big solar flare which gives first-mover-advantage to whoever can better operate in the aftermath. But until then... still hobbyist stuff.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  > We need context addressing and pub/sub, not server addressing and request/response. It's going to require a pretty big conceptual shift. Sadly, I don't see that shift happening until some disaster convinces us that it's necessary. Just my 0.02$ but I don’t see this happening. One, the content rights of media would preclude meaningful distribution and content addresses of commercial media, which is what most care about. After 2023, I think it’s far more likely that generalized human knowledge is captured in an LLM to (somewhat accurately) spew out. That LLM would be distributed and localized - Google already wants to ship a small LLM on each phone. I also don’t see global pub/sub - I think that’s just too many trade-offs for real use cases. Latency/partition-ability etc. I do see everyone’s smarthome/phone ecosystem providing a basic and localized event service. The pendulum does seem to be swinging back to local-first, but I think that will mean personal-scale not web scale.

by fsmv 3y ago

It says it only scales to 80 nodes, so sounds like you won't find a mesh to join unless you make it yourself and it can only be people you know. I want a global mesh network to replace the internet

immibis 3y ago

The internet is already the global mesh network. It turns out one individual contributes nothing, compared to a 1000km 10000Gbps fiber link that costs millions of dollars to lay. But nobody is actually stopping you from getting ports at two DCs or IXes, somehow getting them connected to each other, then charging people to carry traffic between them. I got a price quote for about $800/month to carry 10Gbps 650km in Europe, so that's what you could potentially earn.

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

If you're interested in large meshes, check out wirepas, though it's based on 802.15.4 rather than LoRa. I was a Product Manager for a mesh based personnel tracking system on construction sites. We licensed Wirepas's tech for our solution... wound up learning a lot about the nuances of meshes.

xpe 3y ago

> I want a global mesh network to replace the internet What are your design criteria you have in mind? There are tough tradeoffs around discoverability, latency, availability, security.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Me too. I think the way forward--at least for now--is not large meshes, but partition tolerant apps. A search for "Is Taco Express open right now?" should not resolve a globally unique name to a globally unique address and then ask some distant server which will then ask for your location info so that it can figure out which taco express you mean. That's so fragile. Instead the search should propagate through whichever meshes happen to be in range until it encounters a node which is authoritative on Taco Express hours (which is probably a raspberry pi at the Taco Express). You get local results because they're local to the query. The problem of bridging these meshes is interesting, but it's just not that useful until we have an app ecosystem that doesn't rely on stable addresses for individual nodes. We need context addressing and pub/sub, not server addressing and request/response. It's going to require a pretty big conceptual shift. Sadly, I don't see that shift happening until some disaster convinces us that it's necessary.

r14c 3y ago
honestly i think the main obstacle to global mesh is the lack of a good business case, which is pretty intrinsic to the format. mesh makes it possible to remove almost all intermediaries, so its difficult to position a company in a place where they can capture a significant portion of the generated value. even though a global self-organizing comms network can clearly be seen as a net good. which is basically an echo of the funding issues present in many critical open source components. there are some arguments to be made for cryptocurrency in this space, but for a nascent physical network the value proposition at first will be very small. a VC/startup could try to get into this space, but once the cat is out of the bag it would be very easy to bypass the artificial billing mechanism to create a rogue free mesh using a similar protocol. of course, this doesn't include the very real technical challenges of building a scalable mesh protocol. which are nontrivial in themselves.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Agreed on all points. > its difficult to position a company in a place where they can capture a significant portion of the generated value That's why I want to make the change. Companies tend to wane in trustworthiness over time, but maybe not if they were painfully aware that their relevance depends on explicit trust configs which could be altered by the end user at any moment and with minimal pain on the user's part. Eventually things will get bad enough that a market emerges for businesses that create handcuffs for other businesses... the spiritual successor to VPN's or somesuch. Until then, it's hobbyist stuff. That, or it'll be the big solar flare which gives first-mover-advantage to whoever can better operate in the aftermath. But until then... still hobbyist stuff.
vineyardmike 3y ago
> We need context addressing and pub/sub, not server addressing and request/response. It's going to require a pretty big conceptual shift. Sadly, I don't see that shift happening until some disaster convinces us that it's necessary. Just my 0.02$ but I don’t see this happening. One, the content rights of media would preclude meaningful distribution and content addresses of commercial media, which is what most care about. After 2023, I think it’s far more likely that generalized human knowledge is captured in an LLM to (somewhat accurately) spew out. That LLM would be distributed and localized - Google already wants to ship a small LLM on each phone. I also don’t see global pub/sub - I think that’s just too many trade-offs for real use cases. Latency/partition-ability etc. I do see everyone’s smarthome/phone ecosystem providing a basic and localized event service. The pendulum does seem to be swinging back to local-first, but I think that will mean personal-scale not web scale.