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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 💁‍♀️

reshared this

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

So recognisable!

(and yes, I've recently purchased a lilygo-tdeck for lora/meshcore communication)

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Have fun! I believe some #MeshCore folks down in the south UK managed to send and receive messages to France. It’s a giggle, despite most of the messages being “is this thing on?”. 😁
in reply to James

@james @andy my Fedi guru is in Germany and has been able to communicate with people in Northern Italy (where my parents are based / I am visiting ATM). It'll be fun to try this out... and also bring the equipment to Paris and experiment there too...
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

@andy In theory it's possible, but my efforts with Meshcore up to now have limited my messages to the UK and I can't see anybody on the continent so far.
in reply to Andrew Davison

@andy from Lyon we have managed to communicate with the extreme Germany, close to the triple frontier between Germany, Austria and Czechia. Its rock solid in terms of connectivity.
in reply to leosam

@leosam @andy oooh amazing! I'll definitely reach out when I have my system up and running in Paris
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

👏🏻
I'm starting my Big Tech de-cluttering.
If it's not a secret, what else are you self-hosting?
in reply to 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 it

Edit/Update: I'm not self-hosting it but paying for Linkwarden (a FOSS Pocket alternative)

This entry was edited (6 days ago)
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

I'm glad that your experience has worked out so well. My year 1 mirrored yours and has continued to be so largely bc the fediverse seems oriented toward and around techies. I'm not one and am not interested in becoming one.

So how do I find community here?

in reply to Rebecca Segers

@rebelyn2 I would say follow a lot of hashtags of topics that interest you and you will find your people...

I love this about the fediverse, that you can simply follow hashtags and easily populate your feed with interesting content....

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Sorry to but in, but one thing I've never been able to find my people on is sound design. If anyone knows where the sound designers are hanging out and how to find them, I'd be interested to know. the hash tags around sound design that I've tried haven't yielded much.
in reply to Patrick Laimbock 🇳🇱 🇪🇺

sorry if I forgot to respond Justin (it's been a RIP my mentions kind of day). In terms of advice of people to follow in music production / sound design, maybe @prinlu and @sknob have some leads?
This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

@plaimbock @JustinMac84 @prinlu

A lot of musicians on the fedi, some of whom might lead you to finding what you’re after. Here’s a handy cheat sheet.

nham.co.uk/2025/06/how-do-i-co…

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

I've noticed a load of people using Meshtastic and Meshcore on the Fediverse since my return. I haven't done any Lora stuff in a while (got multiple Heltecs and others plus a bunch of antennas). I might have to give it another go one of the days and see how busy the local scene is now.
This entry was edited (6 days ago)
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

so slow, I joined Mastodon in january and already am on Meshcore now ;-). The indoctrination pipeline has accelerated maybe? Looking into Reticulum now to integrate off-grid with grid communication.
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

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?
in reply to ĞÖKÜ👻👻™

@GOKUSHRM 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 :blobcatcry:

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 :blobcateyes:

in reply to Synnef

@synnef @GOKUSHRM I wrote about how I deleted my Whatsapp account and moved to Signal in January 2020: therealists.org/2020/01/quitti…

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

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

@synnef in my case I deleted 1500 contacts out of 1600 from my device 😅. So now I'm not worry about who's using WhatsApp or who's not.. 😂😂
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

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

in reply to Ian K Tindale

@u0421793 thank you for all the helpful insights Ian. I've bookmarked your toot and I will definitely use it as reference 😊
in reply to Ian K Tindale

Oh this is good! Do you mind if I post over at the meshtastic lemmy community? Ive been thinking of getting my parents a really easy to use node since they want one but dont know where to start. I would pay for the simplest node in the world for them.
in reply to michael

go for it - but set the expectations low (ie here try this, it doesn’t work)
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

See Reticulum

youtu.be/XTnYVh7K6xQ

📷 Data Slayer Media

in reply to wsm

@weldon thank you, I'll check this out (I got multiple recommendations about it)
@wsm
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

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? :O
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

pretty much my journey since birdsite was bought! On the #selfhosting part, though, I went with my own home server running #FreeBSD (ZFS is awesome!).

And regarding #meshtastic, I must warn you that it's a drug. This year I went from "zero" to "regional community builder / crazy dude deploying stealth nodes in trees" in a matter of months 😅 Just so you know what to expect!

This entry was edited (6 days ago)
in reply to Bruno PY2TOZ

@py2toz oh dear - I thought self-hosting was addictive enough. Another addictive hobby? I’m in trouble (actually pretty excited TBH) 😅🤣
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

I love the idea of #MeshNet; my one question is: does it have the capacity to support modern the internet? (I'm assuming, frex, video streaming is probably right out...?)
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Hi there Thank you for your inspiration but when I see my money maybe it’s hard to self host TT
in reply to Jockolato

@mokonoha Understood. That being said, self-hosting could be achieved on an old desktop computer or laptop, FYI. No need for a VPS.

Check out YunoHost's guide: doc.yunohost.org/en/admin/get_…

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Be careful! Meshtastic/meshcore starts off cheap. But then you find your house covered in all different types of little radios and wonder how you got here. 😁

GL on the LoRa journey! If your interested, check out the community !meshtastic@mander.xyz

mander.xyz/c/meshtastic

in reply to michael

@michael ha thank you for the heads-up! I'm already addicted to self-hosting as it is... another addictive hobby? Sign me up 🙊 😂
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

You know...I have a project that uses #yunohost and #meshtastic together. Maybe I should do a blog post or something.

Its a once a day weather report for my region. It posts at around 6:00 am the weather pulled from NWS. Its useful both as a weather report but also a test to see if people get the messages. If they do, they know their node is in a good spot.

Looks like this:

This entry was edited (6 days ago)
in reply to michael

@michael YunoHost AND Meshtastic !!!! Awwwww !!!! Yes please write that blog post 🤩
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

@michael

I've moved over to Meshcore, but I was playing around with that recently too.

in reply to AI6YR Ben

Yeah I like core more for its functionality. My hope is that both tastic and core will have interop at some point...

meshtastic seems like it does better ATM because of hte number of nodes. But its still a hit or miss if the messages actually get to the sender.

Meshcore seems better at actually communicating over state lines. But the client still has a lot of work to do. And there is less nodes in particular. But its still free...so I shoudnt complain too much.

nice script! Looks familiar :D

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

I'm finding it pretty quiet here to start out as well. But quiet's not necessarily a bad thing as other platforms are noisy. Do you know a hashtag or way to broadcast a question that has a hope of getting answered?
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Look at you go Elean. That is fantastic news so far. You are self made techie.
in reply to stu

@superuserdo not a techie yet but a humble disciple in awe of real techies 😅
@stu
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

I totally understand. Its so cool though that you are into self-hosting and learning your way around.
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Does mesh radio communication allow certain apps to communicate? E.g. can Mastodon or Matrix run over mesh radio?
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Done the whole YunoHost thing as well, having no part in Making America Great Again, trying to be European tech sovereignty focused.
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

For the heltec, if you plan to use Meshtastic near Paris, you will have to make cautious choices over the frequency/mode to use : wiki.mesh-idf.fr might be a good read if not already seen
in reply to EnigmaRotor

@EnigmaRotor thank you! I was planning to use it mostly in Italy in the countryside, but I will keep this in mind for Paris 🙏
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

in reply to EnigmaRotor

@EnigmaRotor Merci pour l'explication ! J'ai déjà trouvé quelques nœuds près de chez moi en Italie sur la carte Meshcore. Idem pour mon quartier à Paris... mais pas tellement pour la région où vivent mes beaux-parents. J'ai hâte de tester ça !
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

je pense qu’investir dans deux heltec peut être une bonne idée (ça n’est, au global, pas très coûteux: la carte ne coute pas grand chose) avec l’un en meshcore et l’autre en Meshtastic. Je pense faire ça dans le futur. Il y a ensuite le sujet du boîtier : si tu as la chance d’avoir une imprimante 3D: j’ai vu pas mal de boîtiers à imprimer. Moi j’avais acheté le mien ici : zerofox3d.com/products/nibbler… pratique avec un clip ceinture. Revers de la médaille: envoyé depuis UK donc des taxes d’importation plus coûteuses que le produit lui même…
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

The Fedi is a trap!

I'm degooglifying, demicroslopping, detwittered, avoid Adobe, & only use Messenger because family & friends won't leave.

I've got Linux on my PC, & expect to switch my laptop. Seriously considering setting up my old Pixel Pro 7 (a crap phone I won't recommend) with GrapheneOS, because why not, it'll be fun.

Occasionally I think about self hosting, & I really want to get into Home Assistant.

A TRAP! 😂

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

awesome! Your path sets an example. I try to follow. Let's continue this and please share every step as you already do: this helps to follow ;)
Now I want to know more about this radio thing. @projetslibres_podcast please tell me you have some content about that ?!
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

from my personal experiance: the #HeltecV3 is not fit for battery use. It simply draws to much current. I am happy with a #HeltecT114. The very same battery that lasts around 16 hrs in the V3 now lasts nearly two weeks.
This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Archaide

@Archaide wow, thank you for the recommendation! I'm compiling all this great advice in a document 😊
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

Year 5 (2027):
Get into HAB (High Altitude ballooning) and build a federared mesh network with nodes at 10+ km altitude

Year 6 (2028):
Get a ham (amateurradio) license

Year 7 (2029):
Get into amateur satellite and space based mesh networks :-)

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

well, next time you come to FOSDEM, feel free to drop by the amateurradio infobooth and will show you all the geekyness and fun radio-technology has to offer.

Usually we are in the AW building. (Can't miss it, it the building with the large radiomast in front of it 😆 )

But, as Michael also mentions below, be carefull, as once you enter the wonderfull and sometimes magical world of radio technology and mesh* networking, there is no way going back. 😀

Enjoy the ride!

in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

also been looking for meshtastic stuff, I joined fedi in one of the first big migrations. Never went back haha
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

I recently started self-hosting Mastodon and Peertube. I'm starting to enjoy social media for the first time in a long time. Yay Fedi!
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂

I've followed the #Fediverse -> #Mesh #Meshtastic arc as well 🙌 Seems like the way to ultimately enjoy an unencumbered internet