I just started using this so I know very little.
From what I gather, there’s a default channel called “LongFast” which every device has from the start. I can see some messages in “LongFast” where I am.
I can see I can create another channel and share it via link, QR, etc.
Do people make such channels and share them publicly, for say local or topical chat groups? E.g. “Canada”, or “Meshtastic Support”, “BurningTesla”, or “Cats”? Is this a thing? Can it be a things?
When I check local groups info, I see links to online comms like Telegram (ew), Discord, Matrix, etc. I don’t see Meshtastic channel links.
Would you create a public channel that doesn’t need vetting, posting its info publicly somewhere?
Would I personally? No. If you’re posting the pre-shared key publicly, then might as well just use the default one.
What about topical channels if the mesh grows large, to hundreds or thousands of people? E.g. ask support questions in “Local Support” instead of “LongFast”
I do have my private channels named (with the exception of a single secondary channel called LongFast to be able to interact with the “default”/public mesh), but you can only have 7 (or is it 8?) channels per device; that’s a hard limit of the firmware/protocol.
From what I’ve read, I think there’s also an upper limit of around a hundred nodes per mesh.
Interesting. I guess it’s a self-limiting problem. In effect LongFast would be limited by the number of nodes in your vicinity. Even in a large network, messages propagate to 3 hops so you won’t be able to see messages from further away, even if the mesh has thousands more nodes further away.
This mesh doesn’t seem to have 100-node limit. It seems to be a device limit where a device can only remember up to 100 nodes and it seems to be removing old ones as it discovers new ones.
Ah, maybe that’s the 100 node limit I was thinking of. I’m still relatively new to this myself.